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Milk Sherbet
Four cups of milk, one and one-half cups of sugar, juice of three lemons, juice of one orange. Mix the juice of the fruit and sugar till half melted, then pour in the milk slowly. If the milk is added too rapidly the mixture may curdle. Freeze in three parts of ice added to one part of salt. - Stella A. Downing.
A plain acid-and-milk sherbet from the era of the hand-cranked freezer. Everything depends on how the acid meets the milk.
- The hinge: add the milk slowlyLemon and orange juice can curdle milk if the two are combined too fast; the recipe says so itself. Have both cold and pour the milk into the sweetened juice in a thin stream while stirring. Some graininess may persist even after churning.
- "Half melted" sugarThis means stirring the sugar into the juice until roughly half of it has dissolved, not heating anything. Given the low volume of juice, expect to keep stirring; a few minutes' rest lets the rest dissolve during churning.
- Three parts ice to one part saltThis is the packing for a bucket-style churn freezer: crushed ice layered with rock salt in the space around the canister, the proportions presumably by measure rather than weight, though the recipe does not say. A modern ice cream maker with a pre-frozen bowl or compressor needs none of it.
- Fruit quantities'Juice of three lemons, juice of one orange' is imprecise; expect roughly 1/3 to 1/2 cup lemon juice and 1/4 to 1/3 cup orange juice. Taste before freezing -- the sweetness should read as slightly too sweet warm, since cold mutes it.
- Milk, not creamOrdinary whole milk is what the recipe assumes. Skim or low-fat will freeze harder and icier; the fat, together with the generous sugar, is what keeps the texture from reading as plain ice.
- Churning matters more than usualWith no cream, no eggs and no stabiliser, this needs constant agitation while freezing or it sets solid. A still-freeze in a tray will need scraping with a fork every 20 minutes or so for the first couple of hours.
- Yield and servingAbout 1 1/2 quarts, serving six to eight. Best eaten within a day or two — it firms up sharply in a modern freezer and benefits from ten minutes on the counter before scooping.
Milk sherbets sat in an awkward middle ground in American cookbooks around the turn of the century: not a water ice, which used fruit juice and syrup alone, and not an ice cream, which required cream and often eggs. They were cheap, which is likely part of the reason they appear so often in community-contributed sections like this one -- milk was generally the cheaper and more readily available of the two, cream the deliberate purchase. The ice-and-salt packing assumed here was the standard method before mechanical refrigeration reached the home; salt lowers the freezing point of the surrounding ice bath well below 32F, which is what allows the canister's contents to freeze at all while being cranked.