Week Three: Citrus
When I started making historic ice creams, my friend was dubious because, in her words, “If the Victorians had perfected ice cream, then we’d still be making it that way.” I suspect the reason we don’t still make ice cream the way the Victorians did is because it is blooming expensive. I made some lovely vanilla ice cream using about £15 of vanilla pods and thought that was expensive, but it doesn’t even come close to cederata ice cream.
First of all, I had a bit of a time figuring out what cederata is (or, as it turns out, what cederatas are.) It’s an outdated term now, and was possibly even outdated then because the only references I could find were from Frederick Nutt. He left a couple of clues though, in directing the reader to the Italian warehouses and, in another book of his called The Imperial and Royal Cook, he said “if you have not (cederatas) grate a lemon in it.” After excluding the results that suggested it was cedarwood oil (because I don’t really want to eat a pine forest, plus there’s suggestion that it’s toxic when ingested) I came upon cederatas as citrons. It turns out both Jarrin and Jeanes did also refer to them, but as cedrats, plus they didn’t have an ice cream made from them. Citrons are one of the original citrus fruits, the others being pomelos and mandarins; we turned pomelos into grapefruits, mandarins into pretty much everything, and citrons into lemons and limes. But don’t mistake a citron for an oversized lemon.
(Although they are big. This wasn’t even the biggest one, it’s just the random one I remembered to photograph.)
There is a lot of peel and pith on a citron. This makes sense considering how Nutt tells you to use it - grate the peel and infuse it with sugar to make cederata essence. It takes a month to make though, and I didn’t have a month, so I treated the citrons as lemons, and made the ice cream using the same method as lemon ice cream. But using ‘lemons’ that cost £80 in total.
Ingredients
I made the amount that Nutt’s recipe gives, but as always I’ve put the percentages in so this recipe can be scaled easily.
219.33g single (19%) cream (23.93%)
358g whipping (39%) cream (39.06%)
154.89g citron juice (16.9%) (it took me eight to nine citrons to get this much juice)
184.32g caster sugar (20.11%)
[6.1g grated citron peel - this is 0.67% of the weight of the ‘main’ recipe, as it all gets sieved out it doesn’t feature in the percentage breakdown)
Method
(I use a stand mixer and balloon whisk, you can do it by hand.)
1. Put the creams and citron juice into a mixing bowl.
2. Add the grated peel.
3. Slowly whisk together whilst gradually adding the sugar.
4. Once the sugar is all added, continue slowly whisking for about 30 seconds.
5. Chill the mixture, ideally overnight.
6. Shortly before churning, re-whisk on a low speed.
7. Pass the mixture through a sieve, to capture the grated peel.
8. Churn according to your ice cream machine’s instructions (I found both lemon and cederata ice cream gave an almost whipped cream texture at the end.)
9. Put ice cream into a container and freeze for several hours to achieve a hard ice cream texture.
I rather enjoyed cederata ice cream. I don’t actually like the taste of citrus very much and I didn’t like the lemon ice cream I made (although my lemon fan mother did, so I don’t think there was anything objectively wrong with it, just not to my taste.) When I smelled the citron juice it had almost a hint of orange to it, this wasn’t in the final ice cream but it was a more delicate citrus taste than lemon, almost floral.
Nutt directs the reader to make cederata essence, which is to say grate the peel, mix with with eight times its weight of sugar, then compress it and leave it for a month. The real cederata ice cream recipe uses this essence, and in a month I look forward to seeing how it compares.
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