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Lemon Milk Sherbet
One quart milk, 2 cups sugar, juice of 3 lemons. Dissolve sugar with milk; add juice of lemons slowly and freeze.
A three-ingredient churned sherbet from the era of the hand-crank freezer. It works, but only if you respect the way acid behaves in cold milk.
- Expect curdling, and manage itLemon juice will flocculate milk protein on contact. Chill both milk and juice hard first, add the juice in a thin stream while whisking constantly, and get the mixture into the freezer at once. The fine grain that results is normal for this style; churning breaks it up so the finished sherbet reads smooth rather than grainy.
- Dissolve the sugar properly"Dissolve sugar with milk" means stir until no crystals remain, not heat. Whisk the 2 cups sugar into the cold quart of milk for a minute or two, or warm a cup of the milk to dissolve it and then chill the whole mixture back down before the lemon goes in.
- "Freeze" means churnIn the period this went into a bucket freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt, turned by hand for 20-25 minutes. In a modern machine, freeze the fully chilled base 20-30 minutes to soft-serve consistency, then firm it in the freezer for two hours. Still-freezing in a pan without stirring gives a solid brick.
- Milk, not creamWhole milk is what the recipe assumes and what gives the light, icy body of a true milk sherbet. Skim or low-fat freezes hard and tastes thin; substituting cream turns it into ice cream, which is a different dish.
- Lemon quantityLemon size varies, and modern supermarket lemons yield about 3 tablespoons each, so start with 1/3 cup juice, taste the base cold, and add more up to about 1/2 cup. Cold mutes acidity and sweetness, so the unfrozen base should taste slightly too sweet and too sharp.
- Sugar is structuralTwo cups in a quart looks excessive but sugar is what keeps a milk-based sherbet scoopable. Cutting it below about 1 1/2 cups gives a hard, icy result.
- YieldRoughly 1 1/2 quarts once churned, serving eight to ten. Best eaten within a day or two; it develops ice crystals quickly.
Milk sherbets occupy a middle ground that has largely disappeared from American freezers: cheaper and lighter than ice cream, richer than a water ice, and made from what a household already had. Cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s print many of them, usually keyed to whatever fruit was to hand -- lemon, orange, pineapple, mashed berries. The word reaches English from Turkish and Persian sharbat, from an Arabic root meaning to drink; French sorbet is a parallel borrowing rather than the route into English, and the older English sherbets were indeed drinks rather than frozen desserts. Lemon may have persisted partly because citrus kept well through winter when soft fruit did not, and because the acid-and-milk combination produced a granular texture that a hand-cranked freezer could deliver.