Home › Cookery › Lemon Ice Cream
Lemon Ice Cream
One gallon rich cream, six lemons, first rubbed till soft, and then grated. Tie the yellow peel, which has been grated off, in a piece of coarse muslin. Cut each lemon in half and squeeze the juice from it. Strain the juice, and soak the muslin bag of lemon peel in it, squeezing it frequently till it becomes highly flavored and colored by it. Then add two teacups of sugar. In sweetening the cream, allow a teacup of sugar to each quart. Pour the juice into it slowly, carefully stirring. Froth and freeze, reserving a portion of cream to pour in as it sinks in freezing.--Mrs. S. T.
A Philadelphia-style ice cream: no eggs, no cooking, just cream, sugar and lemon. The hinge is the acid — lemon juice dropped into cream too fast, or into cream that is not thoroughly cold, will curdle it.
- Scale it downOne gallon of cream is a party batch for a hand-crank freezer. A quart of cream with a scant cup of sugar and the juice and zest of 1½ lemons fits most domestic 1½–2 quart machines and yields about six servings.
- TeacupA teacup was commonly reckoned at about ¾ of a modern cup, roughly 6 fluid ounces, though the book does not define the measure. "A teacup of sugar to each quart" would then be about 5 oz by weight per quart of cream — sweet, but ice cream needs sugar for texture as well as taste.
- The two cups of sugar in the juiceThat sugar is dissolved into the strained juice, which both tempers the acid and makes the addition to the cream gentler. If you scale down, keep the proportion: roughly a quarter cup of sugar per lemon's juice, stirred until dissolved before it meets the cream.
- Rubbing the lemonsRolling and pressing a lemon firmly on the counter before grating breaks the oil cells in the skin and loosens the flesh, so both zest and juice come more freely. The muslin bag steeping in the juice is a cold oil infusion — a fine mesh tea ball or a square of cheesecloth does the same job.
- Guarding against curdlingHave the cream at refrigerator temperature or colder, pour the sweetened juice in a thin thread while stirring steadily, and use it at once. Warm cream and a fast pour will give you sweet lemon curds.
- "Froth and freeze"Froth appears to mean whisk or whip the mixture to work air in before it goes into the freezer; the book assumes a churn packed with cracked ice and coarse salt, for which period practice suggests roughly three parts ice to one part salt by volume, though no ratio is given here. In a modern machine the dasher does the aerating, so skip the whipping and simply churn the cold mixture.
- Reserving cream to top upThe instruction to add reserved cream as the mix sinks belongs to open-tub churning, where the volume drops as it freezes. It is unnecessary in a sealed canister; hold the whole mixture together and churn it once.
- FinishingChurned ice cream leaves the machine at soft-serve consistency. Pack it into a chilled container and give it two to three hours in the freezer to harden; because there are no eggs or stabilizers it turns icy after a day or two, so it is best eaten the day it is made.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, which is why so many receipts end in initials like "Mrs. S. T." rather than a full name. Eggless cream ices of this kind are generally called Philadelphia-style, to distinguish them from the cooked, custard-based French sort, and they are often said to have been the American default through the nineteenth century — quicker, and undemanding of the cook where good cream was plentiful. Ice cream at this date depended on the ice trade and on the hand-crank freezer patented in the 1840s, which had made a formerly aristocratic dessert reachable for a household with a springhouse, an icehouse, or an ice delivery and someone willing to turn the handle for twenty minutes. The elaborate treatment of the peel — grated, bagged in muslin, steeped in the juice and squeezed repeatedly — reflects a period when lemon extract was neither reliable nor cheap, and flavor had to be coaxed out of the fruit itself.