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Lemon Sherbet
Juice of 3 lemons 1½ cup sugar Mix the juice and sugar; add the milk gradually, stirring con stantly so that the mixture will not curdle. Then freeze. 1 egg 1 quart milk 1 pint cream
A milk sherbet of the old school: no cooked custard, no stabiliser, just dairy soured deliberately by lemon juice and frozen hard. The reason it cannot be made as printed is the egg, which is stirred in raw and never heated at any point.
- The raw egg is the problemNothing in this recipe reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella; the mixture goes straight from the bowl into the freezer, and freezing does not destroy the organism. A whole shell egg suspended in a quart of milk and a pint of cream and served cold to a table of people is exactly the case public-health guidance singles out. Use a current frozen-dessert recipe instead.
- The ingredient list is scrambledThe ingredient list is out of order -- The egg, the quart of milk and the pint of cream appear after the method rather than with the lemons and sugar; whether that reflects the original page or its transcription is unclear. The method itself never says what to do with the egg.
- "1 1/2 cup sugar"Printed as 11/2 in the original — one and a half cups, not eleven halves. For roughly two quarts of finished sherbet that is a light hand by modern standards, and low sugar in a dairy ice means a harder, coarser set.
- Why the stirring mattersLemon juice at that concentration will curdle milk on contact. Adding the milk slowly to the sweetened juice, rather than the juice to the milk, keeps the acid diluted and the casein dispersed. Some fine graininess is inherent to the style and was expected.
- "Then freeze"In a period kitchen this meant a hand-crank can packed in cracked ice and coarse salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt, turned until the paddle stiffened. A modern churn does the same job; a still-frozen pan of this mixture would set to a solid block, since there is no cooked base or gum to hold air.
- YieldA quart of milk, a pint of cream and the sugar come to roughly two quarts before churning, which fits a period family or a supper party rather than a household of two.
Milk sherbets sit between the water ice and the ice cream, and American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were full of them: cheaper than a full custard, sharper on the palate, and often served between courses at a long dinner rather than as dessert. The word itself is generally traced through Turkish şerbet from Arabic sharba, a drink — originally a sweetened, chilled fruit beverage, which is why so many early sherbets read like lemonade with dairy added. Lemon was the common flavour, and the acid did useful work: it gave the frozen dairy a bite that plain cream lacked. Loose-leaf books like Mrs. Fryer's were sold as binders that a cook could add to and reorder.