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Lemon Ice Cream
Rub off the yellow outside rind of 4 lemons on hard lumps of sugar, 4 quarts of cream, 2 pounds of sugar, including the lump sugar, with essential oil imbedded, 4 egg whites. Mix well together, put it in a lined kettle and place on the fire, constantly stirring until the cream has reached the boiling point, but not allowing it to boil. Then take it off, immediately strain it through a sieve and let cool. When it has become cool, pour into the freezer; when nearly done add the juice of the lemons. Observe while the zest of the yellow rind is to be worked into the batch at the outset, yet the juice is not to be added until the cream is nearly frozen. The is that if the lemon juice is added before the mixture is frozen it is apt to curdle the cream.
A soda-fountain formula written for a bucket-and-crank freezer and a marble counter, scaled for a shop rather than a household. The chemistry is sound; only the volume and the equipment need translating.
- The hinge: juice goes in lastLemon juice added to hot or unfrozen cream will curdle it on contact — the acid drops the mixture below the pH where casein stays in suspension. Wait until the batch is thick and nearly set, then work the juice in during the last minutes of churning, as written.
- Scale it downFour quarts of cream and two pounds of sugar will yield something close to five to six quarts of finished ice cream. Quarter the whole thing for a home machine: 1 quart cream, 8 oz sugar, 1 egg white, the zest and juice of 1 lemon.
- Rubbing sugar on the rindThis is the old confectioner's method of capturing the peel oil — the "essential oil imbedded" the recipe refers to. Drag sugar lumps hard across the lemon until they are yellow and damp, or rub granulated sugar and grated zest together with your fingertips for a minute. It extracts more aroma than zest alone and does not carry bitter pith into the batch.
- "A lined kettle"Most likely a copper pan lined with tin, so the eggs would not react with bare metal. Any heavy stainless or enamelled pan does the job.
- "Boiling point, but not allowing it to boil"Bring it just up to the point of boiling without letting it break into a boil, stirring constantly. The egg whites will thicken the cream slightly and set into strings if it goes further; the sieve afterwards catches whatever does.
- Whites, not yolksThis is not a French custard. Egg whites give body and a cleaner, sharper finish suited to a fruit flavour, and they help hold the mixture together in the freezer without the eggy richness yolks bring. Do not substitute yolks and expect the same result.
- "The freezer"A hand-cranked ice-and-salt churn. Chill the strained base thoroughly — overnight in the refrigerator is better than the recipe's "let cool" — before it goes into any modern machine, or it will never reach the density the method assumes.
- HardeningStraight from the churn it is soft-serve texture. For firmer ice cream, pack it into a chilled container and freeze two to three hours before serving.
Soda-fountain manuals were trade books, not household cookery: they taught the dispenser to run a counter, and the ice cream chapters read as production formulas in quart and pound quantities because that was the working unit of a shop. Lemon ice cream typically sat alongside lemon water ice and lemon sherbet on such lists, and the distinction mattered commercially — the ice was fruit, sugar and water, the sherbet generally took milk or gelatine, and the ice cream was built on a cooked cream base like this one. Rubbing sugar on citrus peel to draw out the oil is far older than the fountain trade, a confectioners' technique long predating these manuals and still an efficient way to get lemon aroma into a sweet mixture. Dairy and citrus in one vessel is a standing problem, and the answer given here — hold the juice until the cream is nearly frozen and its proteins are locked in place — remained the standard solution.