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Orange Ice
Squeeze the juice of six good oranges and two lemons; pour over the broken peel and pulp five gills of boiling water, let it cool; strain and add the water to the orange and lemon juice. Sweeten to suit the taste with loaf sugar.
Freeze.
A water ice of the simplest kind: citrus juice, a peel infusion for aroma, sugar, and nothing else. The original assumes a crank freezer packed with ice and salt, so the sugar level and the churning are where a modern cook has to make decisions.
- Five gillsA gill is half a cup, so five gills is 2 1/2 cups of boiling water (by the English reckoning of 5 fl oz to the gill it would be nearer 3 cups). With the juice of six oranges and two lemons you end up with roughly a quart of liquid, a little more once sugar is added.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a cone and broken or nipped off as needed; granulated sugar is the direct replacement. The recipe sweetens at the end, after the cooled water is added to the juice; if you would rather not stir sugar into a cold mix, dissolve it in the hot peel infusion instead.
- How much sugar"Sweeten to suit the taste" is doing a lot of work here. Sugar is what keeps a water ice scoopable, so plan on about 1 to 1 1/4 cups for this volume; much less and it freezes to a solid block, much more and it will not set firm.
- The peel infusionPouring boiling water over the broken peel and pulp extracts the oils from the zest, which is where much of the orange flavour lives. The recipe has you let it cool before straining; if you are worried about the white pith turning the mix bitter, strain it off sooner rather than leaving it standing for hours.
- Strain properlyStrain through a fine sieve or a double layer of muslin. Pulp and membrane left in the mix freeze into gritty threads.
- FreezingIn an ice cream machine, chill the mixture thoroughly first and churn 20-25 minutes. Without a machine, freeze in a shallow pan and rake it with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours, which gives a granita texture rather than the smooth ice a crank freezer produced.
- ServingYields about a quart, or six to eight small servings. Ices of this kind were commonly served in small glasses as a palate cleanser between courses or as a light finish rather than as a bowl of dessert.
Water ices reached English and American tables well before ice cream did, and by the late nineteenth century an orange or lemon ice was often served midway through a formal meal to reset the palate. The recipe's reliance on a peel infusion rather than extract or liqueur reflects a period when citrus oil was extracted at home from the fruit in hand, and a recipe could end in the single word "Freeze" and expect to be understood. The specification of loaf sugar is a small time marker too: granulated sugar was displacing the traditional cone through this era, and recipe writers were still naming the older form out of habit.