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Lemon Ice-Cream
Squeeze a dozen lemons, make the juice quite thick with white sugar, stir into it very slowly, three quarts of cream, and freeze. Orange ice-cream is prepared in the same way, using less sugar.
A Philadelphia-style ice cream — no eggs, no cooked custard, just acid, sugar and cream. It works, but the order of operations is the whole recipe.
- The hinge: cream into juice, slowly and coldLemon juice will curdle cream on contact if it is dumped in. Have the cream refrigerator-cold, pour it into the sweetened juice in a thin stream while whisking, and stop if you see graininess. Some cooks reverse it and whisk the syrup into the cream, which is more forgiving.
- A dozen lemonsExpect somewhere around 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 cups of juice from a dozen modern ones — measure rather than count, and aim for roughly 2 cups for three quarts of cream.
- "Quite thick with white sugar"This means a heavy syrup, not a pourable one: sugar stirred in until the juice barely moves, somewhere near 2 to 2 1/2 lb for that volume of juice. The quantity is genuinely open-ended in the original, so taste the finished mixture before freezing — it should be distinctly sweeter than you want the frozen result, since cold mutes sweetness.
- ScaleThree quarts of cream plus syrup makes close to a gallon, which suits a large hand-crank freezer or a party. Most modern machines take 1 to 1 1/2 quarts of base at a time; quarter the recipe.
- "And freeze"In this period this meant a hand-crank churn packed with cracked ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt, cranked twenty to thirty minutes and then left to harden. In a modern machine, chill the base thoroughly first, then churn as usual.
- Why it churns slowlyThat much sugar and acid depresses the freezing point, so the base takes longer to set than a plain custard and stays soft. Ripening it in the freezer for a few hours firms it up.
- Cream to useHeavy cream gives the intended richness; anything lighter curdles more readily against the acid and freezes harder. Ultra-pasteurized cream works but whips and freezes with slightly less body.
- The orange variationOranges are sweeter and much less acidic, so less sugar is right — and the flavor is weaker. Adding grated zest, rubbed into the sugar first, does more for orange ice cream than more juice will.
Uncooked ice creams like this one — cream, sugar and flavoring, with no eggs and no stovetop stage — are what confectioners came to call Philadelphia-style, in contrast to the French custard base. They were one common American home approach through the nineteenth century, alongside the cooked custards printed in the same manuals, for the simple reason that they needed no cooking, only cream and a working freezer. That both were available to the readers of The Dixie Cook Book says a good deal about the period: the commercial ice trade had put harvested northern lake ice within reach of Southern towns by rail, and a whole section of "Ices and Ice-Cream" in a household manual assumes an icehouse or a regular delivery. The freezer itself would have been a hand-crank pail with a dasher, a design generally traced to patents of the 1840s and by this date sold cheaply everywhere. Lemon was among the most common flavorings.