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Orange Sherbet
Juice 2 large navel oranges and 1 lemon Mrs. C. Klepper. 2 scant cups sugar 1 qt. milk Mrs. M. R. Miller.
Place in freezer and turn for 10 minutes.
A two-ingredient-plus-sugar milk sherbet of the sort that filled church cookbooks in the hand-crank era. The text is garbled by the printer, with two contributors' names dropped into the middle of the ingredient list; read it as juice of 2 navel oranges and 1 lemon, 2 scant cups sugar, and 1 quart milk.
- The hinge: acid into milkDissolve the sugar in the cold milk completely, then stir in the citrus juice slowly at the very end, working quickly and getting the mixture into the freezer at once. The acid will flock the milk protein no matter what you do; the point is to keep the curds fine enough that freezing and churning break them up. Never warm the mixture, and never let the juice sit in the milk before churning.
- "Place in freezer"The freezer here is a hand-crank ice-cream freezer: an inner canister set in a bucket packed with crushed ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt by volume. It is not the freezer compartment of a refrigerator, and the recipe makes no sense read that way.
- Ten minutes of turningTen minutes gets a mixture this thin only to a soft slush in a well-salted freezer. Expect 20 to 30 minutes in a modern electric churn, and plan on two to three hours of hardening in the freezer afterward. There is no cream and no egg here, so it will set hard and icy.
- "Scant cups"A scant cup is filled just short of level, so about 15 tablespoons rather than 16. Two scant cups is roughly 380 g of sugar, which is on the high side but necessary: sugar is the only thing keeping this from freezing into a solid brick.
- Navel orangesNavels were a selling point around the turn of the century because they were seedless and unusually sweet. Two large ones yield roughly 2/3 to 1 cup of juice; with the lemon, figure about a cup of juice in all. Strain out the pulp if you want a smoother texture.
- Milk choiceWhole milk is what was meant, and it is what works. Skim milk gives a coarse, splintery ice; substituting half cream will soften it considerably but takes it away from a sherbet.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 quarts, serving six to eight.
Milk sherbets like this one belong to a narrow American tradition distinct from the water ices of French confectionery: cheap, sweet, sharply acidic, and dependent on nothing more exotic than milk, sugar and fruit. They spread with the hand-crank freezer, patented in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century and cheap enough by the end of the century that a church social could turn out several gallons in an afternoon with donated ice. If, as the format suggests, this comes from a compiled congregational cookbook set from handwritten slips, the two names stranded mid-list, Mrs. C. Klepper and Mrs. M. R. Miller, may well be the attributions for two adjacent recipes that the compositor ran together. Navel oranges are worth noting as well: shipped east from California in growing volume as the refrigerated fruit trade took hold, they may still have been novel enough that specifying them signalled a slightly special dessert.