Don't make lemonade

Food and cooking are so very often about connection to other people. In normal times, certainly, but also in these constrained new times. Not just the obvious connections of eating and cooking with, or for people (like Francesca’s ‘Shall we have a pizza tonight?’, but connections across time and place (like Katy’s sloe gin).

Simple actions like breaking an egg, or staring hopelessly at some ingredients waiting for inspiration to strike (‘chop and fry two onions and an idea will come!’), or making something once-new (scones), or complicated (Polish sponge cake), or delightfully simple (lemon ice-cream) will time and time again take me back to somewhere and somewhen else. (Never mind the other, slightly more tangible, connections from scraps of handwritten recipe tucked inside an old cook book…)

It is, in fact, the ice-cream (and not the inspiration-hunting) that comes with this post.

I don’t imagine many (any) of you have a glut of either lemons or cream right now. But good going if you do! Actually, I never have lemon gluts. Lots of lemons, sure, but they rarely overwhelm. I’ve never really understood the phrase ‘when life gives you lemons’: as a north European, why wouldn’t I think lemons were a good thing to get? Magical little balls of sunshine. (And making lemonade certainly wasn’t and isn’t a part of my kitchen life.)

You can take the rare books librarian out of the library...
A photo of a tupperware of yellowish stuff is not interesting. This is a lemon tree from John Gerard's Herball, or generall historie of plantes, 1636 edition. Courtesy of the University of Toronto.

Cream, on the other hand. Well, it turns out that it is possible to whip too much cream for a Christmas trifle. I know. I was surprised, too, but it happened last December: fully half a bowl of half-and-half double and whipping cream, all peaked and fluffy and lovely and nowhere to put it.

So I improvised, and adapted a long-treasured recipe for the easiest ice-cream ever. You might not be able to make it now, but do hang on to it for later.

The original doesn’t even need you to whip anything. It goes like this:

Ingredients

• 3 Lemons (I deffo didn’t have this many to hand last time I did this – I used what I had and some squeezy lemon juice)
• 200g caster sugar (or granulated)
• 450 ml double cream (I couldn’t easily measure this last time, owing to much of the cream coming in unnecessarily whipped form)
• 1/2 tsp salt (yes, really)

Method

• Grate rind of one lemon.
• Squeeze the juice of all 3 lemons, and stir rind and juice into the sugar.
• Slowly add the cream and salt, mixing carefully. It will immediately thicken.
• Pour into a shallow container and freeze until solid around the outside and mushy in the middle.
• Stir with a fork and freeze until firm. Yes, really. Yes, just the once. This is the one ‘easy’ ice-cream recipe I know where this really works.

The recipe came to me via a student friend, who had, believe it or not, heard it on Woman’s Hour. Look, here it still is on a very long-forgotten BBC webpage. (Does Woman’s Hour still do recipes? I haven’t listened in a long time.)

We tried it out, successfully, in a student kitchen: truly the easiest ice cream! The friend is still a friend, and the recipe is dead handy for emergency puddings. A couple of nights ago we had it alongside some roast rhubarb (15 mins, hot oven, a little brown sugar and ground cardamom sprinkled over) and it was delicious. And I remembered the friend and the kitchen and the making.

Wishing you all many delicious emergency puddings and fond memories to come.