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Lemon Ice
(Gelato di limone) Granulated sugar, 3/4 lb.
Water, a pint.
Lemons, three (good sized).
Boil the sugar in the water, with some little pieces of lemon peel, for about ten minutes, in an uncovered kettle. When this syrup is cold, squeeze the lemons one at the time, tasting the mixture to regulate the degree of acidity. Then strain and put in the freezer packed with salt and ice.
A plain sorbet syrup, and the proportions still work: about 2 cups water, 1 2/3 cups sugar, and the juice of three lemons. The one thing the recipe insists on is tasting as you add the juice, and that is worth taking literally.
- Weights and volumes3/4 lb granulated sugar is about 1 2/3 cups; a pint of water is 2 cups. Three good-sized lemons yield roughly 1/2 to 2/3 cup of juice, which is why the recipe tells you to add it gradually rather than all at once.
- Add the juice off the heatThe syrup is boiled first and cooled completely before the lemon goes in. Boiled lemon juice loses its brightness and turns faintly cooked; the whole point of the sequence is to keep the acid raw.
- Peel, not pithUse pared strips of zest with no white attached, and only steep them during the ten-minute boil. Left in longer, or cut too deep, they turn the syrup bitter.
- Do not cut the sugarThe sugar here is structural as well as sweet. At this concentration the ice stays scoopable; cut the sugar substantially and it will freeze harder and icier.
- "The freezer packed with salt and ice"This means a hand-crank ice cream freezer: the mixture goes in the inner canister, and coarse rock salt layered with crushed ice fills the bucket around it, in proportions ranging from about one part salt to three of ice for fast freezing to about one in eight for slower. A modern ice cream machine does the same job; without one, freeze in a shallow metal pan and rake it with a fork every 30 minutes until granular.
- Texture and terminologyDespite the Italian title gelato di limone, this is what would now be sold as a sorbet or water ice — no dairy, no eggs. Italian usage has long applied gelato broadly to frozen sweets.
- YieldAbout a quart, serving four to six in small glasses. It is at its best within a day; after that it hardens and the lemon flavour flattens.
Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book (1919) was written for American households, and its chapter on syrups and ices reflects a genuinely old Italian specialism: water ices were a Neapolitan and Sicilian trade well before they were a domestic one, sold by street vendors and caffè and made possible by the ice and snow trade that brought packed snow down from Etna and the Apennines. Salt-and-ice freezing — the discovery that salt lowers the melting point of ice enough to freeze a sweetened liquid beside it — is generally traced to sixteenth-century Italy, and it remained the usual method in home kitchens for a long time thereafter. The recipe's instruction to taste as the juice goes in has a practical basis: lemons varied enormously in size and acidity, and no fixed measure could be trusted.