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For the Lemon Ice
For the lemon ice, mix together the juice of six lemons, two cupfuls of sugar and three cupfuls of water. Strain and turn it into the freezer. When the ice and salt are packed, add to it two cupfuls of sweet milk and freeze Fill it into the center of the coffee ice cream. at once.
A hand-cranked water ice sharpened with milk, meant to be packed into the middle of a coffee ice cream as a two-tone mould. The printed text has a line of type out of order: "Fill it into the center of the coffee ice cream" belongs at the end, after "freeze at once."
- The hinge: add the milk at the churn, not beforeLemon juice curdles milk on contact, and the likely reason for holding it back until the freezer is packed and turning is that the mixture starts setting before curds can gather into visible flecks. Standing time before churning risks a grainy, separated ice.
- "Freezer" means the churnA wooden bucket with a metal can and a crank dasher, surrounded by cracked ice and rock salt at roughly three parts ice to one part salt by volume. An electric or frozen-bowl machine works, though the milk must still go in at the last moment, with the paddle already moving.
- Six lemonsLemon size varies, so six will give somewhere around a cup of juice. Measure rather than count, and hold at 3/4 to 1 cup for 2 cups sugar and 3 cups water.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh whole milk, named to distinguish it from sour or buttermilk, which nineteenth-century kitchens kept as a separate staple. Whole milk is the right substitute; cream will read as ice cream rather than ice.
- Strain before freezingPips and pulp will not dissolve and become hard specks in the finished ice. A fine sieve after the sugar has gone into solution is enough.
- Texture and holdingWith this much sugar the ice stays relatively soft but will firm up hard in a modern freezer, which generally runs colder than a salt-packed can. Let it stand 10 to 15 minutes at room temperature before serving.
- YieldRoughly two quarts, more than enough to fill the centre of the coffee ice cream.
Ices built in two colours inside a mould were the standard company dessert of the late-Victorian and Edwardian table, and the effect, not the difficulty, was the selling point: an outer ice cream cut to reveal a contrasting core. Adding milk to a lemon water ice produces what older confectioners' manuals are generally said to have called a lemon milk sherbet, a category sitting between the dairy-free water ice and true ice cream, and it seems to survive in the American use of "sherbet" for a fruit ice containing a little milk, as distinct from British "sorbet." The dependence on a hand-cranked freezer packed with ice and rock salt is usually taken to date such a recipe to the era after cheap commercial ice made frozen desserts possible in ordinary households, which may be roughly why cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s are so thick with them.