Orange Ice
4 cups water. 2½ cups sugar. 2 cups orange juice. 1/2 cup lemon juice.
Rind of two oranges.
PROCESS: Pare the rind as thinly as possible from two oranges; add to water and sugar, and cook twenty minutes. Remove rind, add fruit juice, strain, cool and freeze. Serve in stem glasses.
A plain sugar-syrup sorbet with no eggs, cream or gelatine, which makes it easy to reproduce exactly as written. The only real translation needed is what "freeze" meant in 1913.
- "Freeze" means a churned freezerThe original assumes a hand-crank freezer packed with ice and rock salt, which churns as it chills. An ice cream machine does the same job in 25-40 minutes. Without one, freeze in a shallow metal pan and rake it thoroughly with a fork every 30 minutes for about 3 hours, or it will set into a solid block.
- Pare, do not zestTake the coloured skin off in thin strips with a swivel peeler and leave the white pith behind. Pith boiled for twenty minutes can turn the syrup bitter; the recipe has you lift the rind out before the juice goes in.
- Do not cut the sugarTwo and a half cups of sugar to four cups of water plus two and a half cups of juice works out at roughly a quarter sugar by weight, and that is what keeps the ice scoopable rather than glassy. Reducing it noticeably will give a harder, icier result.
- Cover the panTwenty minutes at a simmer will boil off a good deal of water if the pan is open, concentrating the syrup. Keep a lid on, or top the syrup back up to roughly its starting volume before adding the juice.
- Chill fully before churning"Cool" here means cold, not tepid. Refrigerate the strained base for several hours or overnight; a warm base overruns the machine's capacity and produces coarse crystals.
- Orange juiceFreshly squeezed, and strain out the pulp as directed. Commercial chilled juice is pasteurised and often blended for consistent sweetness, which flattens the result; if you use it, keep the full half cup of lemon juice for acidity.
- YieldAbout two quarts of base, giving ten to twelve servings in the small stemmed glasses the book intends. As a between-courses ice rather than a dessert, it will stretch further.
Fifty-Two Sunday Dinners was issued in 1913 by Elizabeth O. Hiller, reportedly as a promotional cookbook for a baking powder company, laying out a full menu for every Sunday of the year. Water ices of this type — sugar syrup, fruit juice, no dairy — were standard in American household cookery from the mid-nineteenth century onward, served either as a light dessert or, in more formal menus, as a palate-clearing course between the roast and the game.