Home › Frozen Desserts › Lemon Sherbet
Lemon Sherbet
Juice of 3 lemons 1 1/2 cups sugar 1 quart milk Mix juice and sugar, stirring constantly while slowly adding very cold milk. If added too rapidly, mixture will curdle. However, this does not affect quality. Freeze and serve.
Royal Baking Powder is Absolutely Pure
A milk sherbet of the simplest kind — three ingredients, no cooking, no eggs. The whole technique lives in one instruction, and the recipe tells you what it is.
- The hinge: cold milk, added slowlyLemon juice at full strength curdles milk on contact. Chilling the milk to just above freezing and dribbling it into the sweetened juice while stirring keeps the curd fine enough to be invisible once frozen. The original is right that a slightly broken mixture still tastes fine, but the texture is noticeably grainier.
- Dissolve the sugar firstStir the 1 1/2 cups sugar into the lemon juice before the milk goes in. With only three lemons' juice much of the sugar will only go into solution as the milk is added, so keep stirring until no grit remains; sugar left undissolved at freezing time gives a gritty sherbet.
- What "freeze" meantIn a book of this vintage the instruction assumes a hand-crank freezer: the canister packed in a bucket of cracked ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt, cranked twenty to thirty minutes. An ice cream machine does the same job. Without one, freeze in a shallow metal pan and beat thoroughly with a fork or in a food processor three or four times at 30-minute intervals.
- Milk, not creamA quart of whole milk gives a hard, icy sherbet by modern standards — this is closer to a frozen lemonade than to sorbet. Period milk was also not homogenized. Whole milk is the correct substitute; skim will freeze into a solid block.
- Lemon quantityThree lemons may yield anywhere from about 1/2 to 3/4 cup of juice depending on size; reckon on about 1/2 cup. If your lemons give appreciably more, the mixture will curdle harder and taste sharper.
- Yield and servingAbout 1 1/2 quarts, serving six to eight. Let it stand at room temperature five to ten minutes before scooping — with no egg, no cream and no stabiliser, it freezes very firm.
The New Royal Cook Book was one of a long series of promotional booklets issued by the Royal Baking Powder Company, which is why the page ends with an advertising line rather than a serving note. Milk sherbets like this one were a standard American summer dessert before home refrigeration: they used no eggs and no cream, so they cost little and carried no risk of a custard splitting, and they could be frozen in the same crank freezer the household already owned for ice cream. The word sherbet traces back through Turkish şerbet to Arabic sharba, a drink — originally a chilled sweetened fruit beverage, which is essentially what this recipe is until it goes into the ice. The frank admission that curdling "does not affect quality" is characteristic of the genre: these booklets were written for cooks working without thermometers or reliable ice, and reassurance was part of the service.