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Frozen Lemon Custard
Make simple custard (see Introductory Recipes for "Custard") or Lemon Custard, and let cool. Grate three lemons, using this or lemon tincture for flavouring. If the rind is used stir in with the milk before cooking the custard. If tincture is used add just before freezing. (The quantity will depend upon the quality and strength of the flavouring).
This is a cross-reference recipe of the kind common in fruit-cookery books: the base custard is assumed, and only the lemon treatment is spelled out. Two decisions carry the whole dish — when the lemon goes in, and how you freeze it.
- The hinge: acid and hot milkLemon juice added to a warm dairy custard will curdle it, which may be part of why this recipe keeps to rind and tincture. If you want juice in the mix, add it cold, after the custard has fully chilled, and freeze at once.
- "Grate three lemons"This means the zest only — the coloured outer layer, taken off with a fine grater or rasp. Any white pith carried along turns bitter.
- Lemon tinctureA period term for lemon oil or zest steeped in alcohol; the modern equivalent is lemon extract. Because strength varies enormously, the vague instruction is honest: start with a teaspoon per quart and taste.
- Custard base, if you need numbersA workable simple custard is 2 cups milk or half-and-half, 4 egg yolks, 1/2 cup sugar and a pinch of salt. Cook over low heat, stirring, until it coats a spoon and registers 175-180F; above about 185F it scrambles.
- Steeping the rindStirring the zest into the milk before cooking, as directed, is genuinely the better method — the oils are fat-soluble and give a rounder flavour than extract. Strain the custard before chilling unless you want flecks.
- Chill before freezing"Let cool" should mean refrigerated to 40F or below, ideally several hours. A barely-warm custard churns to a coarse, grainy texture.
- "Freezing"This would most likely have meant a hand-crank freezer packed with ice and coarse salt. An ice-cream machine does the same work; without one, freeze in a shallow pan and beat the mixture thoroughly two or three times as it sets.
Frozen custards belong to the long era of the hand-crank ice-cream freezer, which put iced desserts within reach of ordinary households from the mid-nineteenth century onward and made them a fixture of American summer cookery. The reliance on grated rind and "lemon tincture" rather than juice reflects both chemistry and supply: alcoholic extracts of lemon peel kept indefinitely on a pantry shelf, while the fruit itself was seasonal and, away from the coasts and the citrus states, expensive. Single-fruit cookbooks like this one were popular in the decades around 1900, organised by ingredient rather than by course, and their entries are often written as variations on a master recipe kept elsewhere in the book — a habit that assumed a cook who already knew how to make a custard and needed only to be told what to do with the lemons.