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Good and Cheap Sherbet
Make a quart of lemonade with three lemons and one cupful of sugar. When partly frozen add one pint of cream sweetened and flavored with vanilla. In making the lemonade the sugar should be dissolved over the fire in part of the water. This is true of all sherbets. They have a finer grain if the sugar used is put over the stove in part of the liquid just long enough to dissolve it thoroughly.
A two-part sherbet: a lemon syrup base churned to a slush, then enriched with sweetened cream. The single instruction that matters is the one the author repeats — dissolve the sugar in hot liquid before chilling, or the finished ice will be grainy.
- The syrup stepHeat about a cup of the water with the cup of sugar only until the crystals disappear, then cool it completely before combining with the lemon juice and remaining water. Undissolved sugar is what produces a sandy texture, and cooking it longer than necessary begins to concentrate the syrup.
- ProportionsThree lemons yield roughly 1/2 cup of juice; with a cup of sugar in a quart of liquid this is a fairly tart, lightly sweet base. Adding a pint of cream brings the finished volume to about 1 1/2 quarts.
- Sweeten the cream separatelyThe recipe says the cream is "sweetened and flavored with vanilla" but gives no amount. Two to three tablespoons of sugar and a teaspoon of vanilla per pint suits the tartness of the lemon base.
- Freezing equipmentWritten for a hand-crank ice-and-salt freezer. In a modern machine, churn the lemonade until it is a thick slush, pour in the cold sweetened cream with the paddle running, and continue until it holds its shape.
- CurdlingCream meeting acidic lemonade can flock if it is combined carelessly. Have both thoroughly chilled and add the cream while the machine is running, so it disperses instead of sitting in contact with the acid.
- Without a machineFreeze the lemonade in a shallow metal pan, breaking it up with a fork every 30 minutes until slushy, then stir in the cream and continue beating at intervals until firm. The grain will be coarser than churned sherbet.
- Storage and servingSherbet at this sugar level freezes hard. Move it to the refrigerator for 15 minutes before scooping. Serves six to eight.
"Sherbet" descends through Turkish and Persian from the Arabic sharbat, a sweetened fruit drink, and the word entered European cookery long before the frozen form did. American usage had settled into something distinct from both the drink and the dairy-free European sorbet: a fruit ice carrying a modest amount of milk or cream, richer than a water ice but far lighter than ice cream. The title's "good and cheap" is the point of the entry — three lemons and a pint of cream stretched to about a quart and a half of dessert. The insistence on dissolving sugar in hot liquid reflects a period when the smoothness of a frozen dessert depended on the cook's technique rather than on stabilizers or a fast commercial freezer.