Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Lemon Ice-Cream
Lemon Ice-Cream
Add to the juice of five lemons the grated peel of one, one-half pint of clarified sugar, and one pint of cream; mix all thoroughly together, then strain through a sieve into a mould or glasses packed in ice, and freeze. Lemon Ice-Cream. No. 2.
Boil one pint of water together with the strained juice of three lemons, and one and one-half breakfast cupfuls of powdered sugar for twenty minutes. Beat the yolks of eight eggs, and one pinch of salt; pour the syrup in a basin, and stand it in a larger one containing hot water. Stir the yolks of the eggs into the syrup and beat rapidly for three minutes. Remove the basin from the boiling water, place it in a pan of ice-water, and beat until cold. Add the cream, pour all into a freezer, and work until frozen.
Two lemon ice creams: the first an uncooked cream, the second a cooked yolk custard. Both assume a hand-crank freezer packed with ice and salt, and both leave a key quantity to the cook's judgment.
- Clarified sugarThis is sugar syrup boiled with water and skimmed clear; period syrups varied in strength, so treat it as a simple syrup unless a heavier one is wanted. Half a pint is one cup of finished syrup, which for a pint of cream gives a moderately sweet, quite tart result.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is usually reckoned at about 8 to 10 fluid ounces, at or a little above a modern measuring cup. One and a half cupfuls of powdered sugar is therefore somewhere near 12 to 15 fluid ounces by volume; err on the lower side and taste the syrup before it meets the yolks.
- "Powdered sugar" is not confectioners' sugarIn this period powdered sugar meant granulated sugar ground finer, with no cornstarch in it. Use ordinary granulated or caster sugar, not the boxed powdered sugar sold today.
- The unstated creamNo. 2 says only "add the cream" without a quantity. Matching No. 1 at one pint is reasonable and gives a rich custard; the recipe is genuinely ambiguous on this point.
- Twenty minutes of boilingBoiling a pint of water with sugar and lemon juice for twenty minutes reduces it considerably and concentrates the acid. Watch it; a hard reduction can go past syrup into caramel territory.
- The hinge: acid and dairyFive lemons' juice against a pint of cream can curdle, particularly if the mixture is warm or if it stands. Chill both components hard, combine at the last moment, and strain immediately into the freezer as the recipe directs.
- Eggs and temperatureHot syrup beaten into yolks over hot water is the classic bombe method, but three minutes does not guarantee the mixture reaches 160F. If that matters to you, use pasteurized eggs or take the custard to temperature with a thermometer before the ice bath.
- FreezingNo. 1's moulds "packed in ice" means still-freezing, which produces a dense, slightly icy ice rather than a churned cream. A modern machine churned 20 to 25 minutes gives a better texture for both versions.
- YieldNo. 1 makes roughly a quart; No. 2 depends on how much cream is added. Figure six to eight small servings.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf from its opening in 1893 and published his cook book in 1896, and its ice cream chapter includes the casual instruction to pack moulds in ice and leave them. Lemon was among the oldest of the flavored ices, arriving in European kitchens by way of Italian and French confectioners long before dairy ice creams became common, and giving it cream rather than water was the sort of enrichment that marked a restaurant version. The two numbered recipes show the period's two standard approaches side by side: the Philadelphia style of uncooked cream and syrup, and the richer French custard base built on egg yolks. Oscar prints both without comment.