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Milk Sherbet
4 cups milk. 1½ cups sugar Juice 3 lemons Mix juice and sugar, stirring constantly while slowly adding milk; if added too rapidly mixture will have a curdled appearance, which is unsightly, but will not affect the quality of sherbet; freeze and serve.
A two-ingredient sherbet in principle, though the printed ingredient list has lost a line: no quantity of milk is given. In Farmer's text the proportion is 1 quart milk to 1½ cups sugar and the juice of 3 lemons, and that ratio works.
- Missing measurementThe verbatim entry lists only sugar and lemon juice, yet the method calls for milk. Farmer's printed recipe gives 1 quart (4 cups) milk; treat that as the intended amount. With appreciably less, the mix will be sharper and will freeze harder.
- The hinge: add the milk cold and slowlyLemon juice at that concentration curdles milk on contact. Pour the milk into the sweetened juice in a thin stream while stirring, and keep everything refrigerator-cold. Curdling is cosmetic, as the original says, but a smooth mix churns better.
- Dissolve the sugar firstStir sugar and juice together before the milk goes in. With this much sugar to so little juice it will not all dissolve at this stage, but working it in early helps avoid a sandy finish.
- "Freeze" means a churnIn 1896 this went into a hand-crank freezer packed with crushed ice and rock salt, commonly around three parts ice to one of salt; churning time varied with the machine and the packing. A modern ice cream maker does the job in 20 to 30 minutes.
- Without a machineFreeze in a shallow metal pan and break up the mass with a fork every 30 minutes for 3 to 4 hours. The texture will be granular rather than creamy.
- Lemon yieldThree lemons give roughly 1/2 cup juice; strain out pulp and seeds.
- Yield and servingSomething over a quart. Serve straight from the churn or after a short hardening; held overnight it freezes solid and needs time on the counter to soften.
Milk sherbets sit in an odd middle ground between the water ices and the custard ice creams, using no eggs and no cream, only what was already in the icebox. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book of 1896 devotes a long chapter to frozen desserts because ice was by then a reliable commercial commodity in Northern cities, delivered by the wagonload, and the crank freezer had become standard middle-class equipment. The word sherbet is generally traced through Turkish şerbet and Persian sharbat to Arabic, a drink, and in earlier English usage meant a sweetened fruit beverage rather than anything frozen; the American shift to a milk-containing frozen ice is a nineteenth-century development. That sherbet and sorbet still mean different things on this side of the Atlantic rests instead on a twentieth-century regulatory definition of milkfat content.