Lemon Ice
To one quart of water add one pint of sugar and boil five minutes. Remove from fire and add juice of three large lemons with one dessertspoon of gelatine dissolved in a little cold water. Stir well and, when cool, freeze.
A plain water ice built on a boiled syrup, with a little gelatine standing in for the churn's constant scraping. Two details do the work: the lemon juice goes in off the heat, and the mixture must be fully cold before it goes to freeze.
- The measuresOne quart of water is 4 cups; one pint of sugar is 2 cups by volume, roughly 14 oz. A dessertspoon is two teaspoons, which is close to one modern envelope of powdered gelatine (about 7 g).
- Juice off the heatThe instruction to remove the pan from the fire before adding juice is the hinge of the recipe. Boiling citrus juice dulls the fresh top notes and leaves a flat, cooked-lemon flavour. Three large lemons give roughly 1/2 to 2/3 cup of juice.
- GelatineSprinkle the gelatine over a few tablespoons of cold water and let it swell for five minutes before stirring it into the hot syrup, where it will dissolve without lumps. Its job here is texture, not setting: it keeps the ice from freezing into a solid glassy block.
- Chill completely"When cool" is best read as thoroughly cold, not merely off the boil. A warm mixture in the freezer canister melts the surrounding ice and tends to produce coarse crystals.
- FreezingIn an ice cream machine, churn 20-30 minutes. Without one, freeze in a shallow metal pan and rake the mixture thoroughly with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours, which mimics the old crank-and-scrape action.
- Strain itThough the recipe does not call for it, passing the finished mixture through a fine sieve will catch pips and pulp threads.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 quarts, serving six to eight. It is quite sweet by modern taste; a cook wanting a sharper ice can cut the sugar to about 1 1/2 cups, though less sugar will make the ice noticeably harder and icier.
Water ices reached English and American tables well before ice cream became a household possibility, and lemon was among the commonest flavours. The gelatine suggests a date in the later nineteenth or early twentieth century, when commercial granulated gelatine became cheap and reliable and cookbook writers took it up as a stabiliser for ices, sherbets and jellies alongside the older tricks of beaten egg white or a spoonful of arrowroot. Recipes like this one belong to the era of the hand-cranked freezer packed with ice and rock salt, when a smooth ice was a genuine test of a cook's patience, and any additive that forgave a slack arm was welcome.