Blue Lotus Cream: They forgot to mention the strainer

Today, we at A Book of Cookrye are making a recipe that I've thought about for a long time.

Lotus Cream Juice of 3 lemons 2 cups sugar Pinch of salt 2 lemons, sliced thin  4 cups milk 2 tbsp sugar 1 pint whipping cream Combine lemon juice, 2 cups sugar, and salt. Mix in the lemon slices and let stand for 2 hours. Combine milk and 2 tablespoons sugar in a separate bowl. Freeze, stirring occasionally, until it is mushy. Pour the lemon mixture through a strainer into the milk, discarding the peels. Mix well. Lastly, whip and stir in the cream.* Freeze in an ice-cream machine. *There's no point in worrying about folding in the whipped cream. The ice cream machine will stir it anyway. Mrs Claude Earnest, The Cotton Country Collection; Junior League of Monroe, Louisiana; 1972

 

The Cotton Country Collection, 1972

It looks fairly easy, doesn't it? If you said yes, then I agree except for one sentence: "Slice lemons very, very thin." When I first saw the recipe, I could barely manage to insert the correct part of a knife into food. Slicing things very, very thin was absolutely impossible. As a reminder, this used to happen whenever I tried to cut up a cake:

I'm amazed I remembered to insert a knife into food sharp-side first.

When I first saw today's recipe, the rest of the directions looked just as intimidatingly difficult as knife competence: putting the milk in the freezer and getting out when it is the perfect consistency of "mush," whipping and folding in cream.... the whole business seemed like such a long and complicated procedure when I first read it and every time thereafter. Also, I realized that no one but me would like ice cream with lemon slices suspended in it.

But thin lemon slices need not scare me anymore. I have gotten a lot better at using a knife. Also, I've become almost fanatically obsessed with keeping the good knife sharpened. I always knew sharp knives are safer in the kitchen, but I grew up in a house where the knives kind of knocked loosely around the kitchen drawer. It took me a while to experience a truly sharp knife.

So, let's start off with the most daunting part of the whole recipe:

That wasn't nearly as bad as I feared. We should all sometimes revisit the things we thought were too hard and see if our skills got better while we weren't looking.

Knife intimidation aside, this recipe lodged itself in my head because I couldn't imagine how it would possibly turn out. It was starting to starting to look like it's going to be like marmalade ice cream for people who don't want to make marmalade. 

Would you believe that even with all that sugar, this was still puckeringly tart? 

After freezing, our lotus cream looked so cute with its little lemon slices peeping out.

As is often my way, I tried a spoonful before putting it in the freezer to firm up-- and found that I really should have taste-checked this before turning on the machine. The lemon peels were hard and almost woody. This wasn't a nice crunch like adding nuts, it was a dental trial. 

I should have known this would happen. Back when I used to make marmalade, I once used a recipe that called for both orange and lemon peels. Long after the orange peels were practically a mush, the lemon peels were still as hard as when I dropped them into the pot.

Back to the lotus cream, I had thought that perhaps sugar would penetrate them and do something, but instead I had made ice cream that you couldn't safely eat. I know the recipe says to slice the lemons "very, very thin" and perhaps I'm just not that good with a knife, but I don't think better slicing would have fixed this. Unfortunately, the ice cream also tasted good enough to keep. So, I put it through a sieve and back into the machine.

This is an act of culinary salvage.

By this point, the kitchen mess had finally gotten to me (we had racked up a lot of countertop splats and sticky spots by this point). The stress of future wipedowns combined with the futility of our our super-special thinly sliced lemon peels was too much vexation for one dessert. So, I therapeutically dyed the ice cream blue.

This is actually pretty good if you don't put a lot of raw lemon peels into it. Soaking the peels in sugar sludge gave the ice cream a depth of flavor and a really nice kick. But you should strain them out before anything goes into the ice cream machine.