Home › Frozen Desserts › Lemon Ice Cream
Lemon Ice Cream
i 3 pints thin cream 1 pound sugar Grated rind of 1 lemon Juice of 2 lemons Dissolve the sugar in the cream, reserving about one fourth of it to mix with the lemon. The lemon must not be added until just before the cream is put in the freezer.
An eggless, uncooked ice cream of the Philadelphia type: cream, sugar, flavour, freeze. The whole recipe hangs on one line about when the lemon goes in.
- Add the acid last, and mean itLemon juice can curdle sweetened cream if the two sit together, and churning will not reliably disguise a mixture that has broken. Have the freezer packed and turning before the lemon touches the cream, and churn immediately.
- "Thin cream"This is light or coffee cream, roughly 18-20% butterfat -- not heavy whipping cream at 36%. Three pints is 6 cups. Half-and-half is a little lean but workable; heavy cream will churn to butter-grained ice cream in a crank freezer.
- A pound of sugarAbout 2 1/4 cups granulated. That is a high proportion by modern taste, but sugar is what keeps an eggless, stabiliser-free cream from freezing into a solid brick, so cutting it much will cost you texture.
- The ambiguous "one fourth of it"The sentence can be read as reserving a quarter of the sugar or a quarter of the cream. Reserving cream makes practical sense -- you want a liquid to hold the juice and rind -- so mix the lemon into about 1 1/2 cups of the cream and stir that in at the last moment.
- "The freezer"In this period that means a hand- or motor-crank churn in a bucket of cracked ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt. A modern electric machine with a frozen canister works; a still-frozen tray will not, as there is no egg or gelatin here to mask ice crystals.
- RindGrate only the yellow zest, avoiding the white pith, and grate it directly over the cream so the released oils are not lost on the board. The rind is doing most of the flavour work; the juice mainly supplies the sharpness.
- Yield and servingAbout 2 quarts, or 10 to 12 servings. Ripen it in the packed freezer or the coldest part of a modern freezer for an hour before serving, and eat it the same day -- without eggs or gums it turns grainy after a night or two.
Ice cream made from nothing but cream, sugar and flavouring is what the nineteenth-century American trade called Philadelphia ice cream, as against the cooked custard bases favoured in French practice; the plainness was a point of pride, since it demanded good cream. Lemon was among the older flavours, and lemons kept better than soft fruit. The unqualified reference to "the freezer" points to a period when the ice-and-salt crank churn was ordinary household equipment.