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Lemon Sherbet Made with Milk
To the strained To juice of three lemons, add one and one-half cups of sugar. this add very slowly one quart of milk. Freeze.
Three ingredients and one real technique: keeping acid and milk from curdling into cottage cheese. The garbled first line is a typesetting slip in the original; read it as "To the strained juice of three lemons, add one and one-half cups of sugar."
- The hinge is the pourLemon juice will curdle milk on contact. Dissolve the sugar fully in the juice first, chill both mixtures hard, then add the milk in a thin thread while stirring constantly. A little graininess is normal and freezing masks it; dumping the milk in at once gives you visible curds.
- "Freeze" means a churnIn this period this went into a hand-crank freezer: the can set in a bucket packed with crushed ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt, cranked 20-25 minutes. In an electric machine, churn the chilled mixture 20-30 minutes until it holds a soft ridge.
- Without a machineFreeze in a shallow metal pan and break up the ice crystals with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours. The result is closer to a granita than a sherbet.
- Milk, not creamWhole milk is what the recipe means, and the low fat is why this sets very hard. Let it stand 10-15 minutes at room temperature before scooping.
- Lemon quantityLemon size varies, so measure instead: about 1/3 to 1/2 cup of strained juice for a quart of milk.
- Sweetness is structuralA cup and a half of sugar per quart reads as a lot, but sugar is what keeps the texture from turning to a solid block. Cutting it much below a cup gives you flavored ice.
- YieldAbout a quart and a half, serving four to six.
Sherbets in American cookbooks of this era were the thrifty end of the frozen-dessert page: water ices and milk sherbets needed no eggs and no cream. Making one with milk rather than water was a way to get body and a paler, softer texture, and the resulting curdle-prone mixture is why this recipe insists the milk go in "very slowly." The Butterick Publishing Company sold this book alongside its dress patterns and The Delineator magazine, and it assumes a household with an ice-box, access to a hand-crank freezer, and a delivery of ice in summer.