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Citron Ice-Cream
With lumps of sugar rub off the rind of a large citron, scrape them into a basin, and stir in the juice of a lemon, sweeten with sugar and two breakfast cupfuls of cream. Pour the mixture into a freezer, and work it thoroughly. When frozen, it is ready for use.
A short, eggless cream ice built on citrus oil rather than zest. The whole flavour comes from one step, so it is worth understanding before starting.
- The hinge: sugar as a zesting toolRubbing sugar lumps over the rind until they turn yellow and damp pulls the fragrant oil out of the peel and traps it in the sugar. Modern writers call this an oleo-saccharum, a term borrowed from older pharmacy and punch-making texts, and it gives a rounder, less bitter perfume than grated zest. Do not rush it, and stop before you reach the white pith.
- What a citron isCitron here most likely means the fresh fruit Citrus medica ” a knobbly citrus that is mostly thick, aromatic rind with very little juice; the separate lemon juice in the recipe suggests something other than a lemon was meant. It is not the candied green peel sold for fruitcake, which is no use for rubbing on sugar. If you cannot find one, the rind of two or three unwaxed lemons plus a strip of grapefruit peel gets you close in character.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup, generally around 8 to 10 fluid ounces. Two of them means roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups of cream; use 2 cups of heavy cream, or 1 1/2 cups cream with 1/2 cup whole milk if you want it lighter.
- Sweetening is unspecifiedThe recipe says only "sweeten with sugar," which was left to the cook's judgment. For 2 cups of cream, 1/2 to 2/3 cup of sugar total (including the rubbed lumps) is the working range; below that the mixture freezes hard and tastes flat, since sugar is what keeps a cream ice scoopable.
- The freezer"Pour the mixture into a freezer" means a hand-crank churn set in a bucket of crushed ice and rock salt, not a modern freezer compartment. Any domestic ice-cream machine does the same job; "work it thoroughly" is the instruction that matters, as constant churning is the only thing keeping the ice crystals small in a mixture with no eggs or stabiliser.
- Acid and creamLemon juice will thicken and can curdle cream, especially if the cream is cold and the juice goes in fast. Stir the juice into the sugar first, then add the cream in a steady stream while stirring, and churn immediately rather than letting the mixture stand.
- Chill firstRefrigerate the mixture for a few hours before churning so it enters the machine at about 40F, which shortens the freezing time and improves texture.
- Yield and servingAbout three cups to a quart once churned, or four to six modest servings. This is a Philadelphia-style ice — no custard base — so it is best eaten within a day; after that it firms up and coarsens in the freezer.
Cream ices made without eggs were a common American style through the nineteenth century. The technique here is older than the ice cream: rubbing loaf sugar against citrus rind to capture the oil was long-established practice in punch-making and confectionery before mechanical freezers arrived, and it survived because a cook with a sugar lump and a lemon needed no grater. Fresh citron was an imported fruit in American cities, valued chiefly for a rind thick and perfumed enough to candy. The vagueness of "sweeten with sugar" is typical of the period, when cooks were expected to taste and decide.