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Italian Orange Ice Cream
To one pint of the best cream add twelve ounces of pulverized sugar, the juice of six oranges, rind of three grated, and put in a muslin bag, soaked in the orange juice after it has been strained; squeeze the bag often, giving color to the juice. Add the yolks of eight eggs well beaten; extract of orange, one teaspoonful; then put in the freezer and freeze.
This is an uncooked custard: eight raw yolks are beaten into cream and citrus juice and sent straight to the freezer, with no stage at which the eggs are heated. That is the reason the recipe cannot be recommended, and the notes below explain both the hazard and the older kitchen vocabulary the text assumes.
- The raw yolks are the problemEight egg yolks go in beaten and never see any heat; freezing does not kill Salmonella, it only halts its growth, and the mixture is eaten cold. A modern cooked-custard ice cream recipe, or one built on pasteurised eggs, should be used instead.
- The acid does not make it safeThe juice of six oranges is sometimes assumed to "cook" the yolks the way lime juice cures ceviche. It does not; orange juice is far too weak an acid, and the mixture is diluted with a pint of cream besides.
- "Freeze" meant a salt-and-ice bucketThe freezer here is a hand- or crank-churned pail packed with cracked ice and rock salt, not an appliance. The recipe gives no timing; churning by hand until set typically took a good part of an hour, and the texture was generally coarser than modern churned ice cream.
- Pulverized sugarThis is sugar ground fine, closer to today's superfine or caster sugar than to powdered sugar, which usually carries cornstarch. Twelve ounces is roughly 1 2/3 cups by volume, a very sweet ratio to one pint of cream.
- The muslin bagGrated rind of three oranges is tied in cloth and steeped in the strained juice, then squeezed repeatedly. The bag is simply a strainer: it lets the oil and colour out of the zest while keeping the shreds from the finished ice.
- Extract of orangePeriod orange extract was generally oil of orange peel in alcohol. Coming on top of six oranges' juice and three oranges' zest, a teaspoonful adds little.
- CurdlingEven setting the eggs aside, that much citrus juice poured into plain cream can clabber it; combining the sugar with the juice and adding it slowly reduces the risk. The recipe itself gives no such instruction.
Egg-rich frozen creams reached American cookbooks by way of Italian and French confectioners, and "Italian" was attached to a good many nineteenth-century ice creams; it is often read as a signal that the base was a custard rather than a plain sweetened cream, though the usage was not consistent — the ices sold on the street by Italian vendors in New York and London in the same decades were, confusingly, the opposite thing, water ices with no dairy at all. The instruction to steep grated rind in a muslin bag and squeeze it repeatedly wrings the colour and perfume out of the peel by hand, with the extract added at the end.