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Milk Sherbet
1 quart milk 2 cups sugar 1/2 cup lemon juice To the milk add the sugar and stir until dissolved. Have ready the freezer packed with salt and ice. Just before turning into the freezer, add the lemon juice; stir. If the milk curdles, it will come smooth in the freezing. Do not let this mixture stand long in the freezer after freezing. Unless certified milk is used, the milk should be scalded and then used cooled.
A three-ingredient freezer sherbet from the era of the hand-crank churn. Everything depends on how you handle the lemon juice and how quickly you serve it.
- The hinge: add the acid cold and lastLemon juice in milk curdles it on contact, and the recipe is right that steady churning breaks the curds back down into a smooth body. Chilling the milk and getting the mixture straight into motion is the sensible way to keep the curds fine; juice stirred into warm or standing milk is more likely to give coarse curds.
- "The freezer"This means a bucket-style ice cream freezer, the can surrounded by cracked ice layered with rock salt; directions vary, commonly somewhere between three and eight parts ice to one part salt by volume. A modern compressor machine or a frozen-bowl churn works; so does a shallow pan in the freezer, stirred vigorously every twenty minutes.
- Certified milkCertified milk was raw milk produced under inspected sanitary conditions and sold under a medical commission's seal, a system that has essentially disappeared. Ordinary pasteurized whole milk needs no scalding. The scalding instruction here is a safety measure for raw milk, not a flavor step.
- SugarTwo cups to a quart is not excessive for a churned ice; sugar is what keeps the mixture from freezing into a solid block, so cutting it substantially will give a harder, icier mass rather than a sherbet.
- Do not let it standWhole milk has relatively little fat to hold a fine texture, so the crystals coarsen quickly in the can and the sherbet turns crunchy. This is a dessert to churn and serve, not to keep.
- YieldAbout a quart and a half after churning, serving six to eight in small glasses. Tart and lean; it is closer to a frozen lemonade than to ice cream.
Milk sherbets sit between the water ice and the ice cream, and American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries print them often because they were cheap, quick, and made from what was already in the house. The reference to certified milk points to the decades before pasteurization became universal: the certified milk movement, generally traced to the medical milk commissions organized in the 1890s, was one answer to unsafe dairy, and directions to scald milk that had not been certified appear in cookbooks of the period.