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Orange-Water Ice
Rub the rind of two oranges with three or four lumps of sugar until the yellow part is taken off, and dissolve the lumps in a little warm syrup; if the rind is rubbed too hard the ice will be bitter. Strain and stir into it the juice of six oranges and a lemon, with half a pint of water, a pint of clarified sugar and the flavoured syrup. Mix thoroughly. Strain and freeze in the usual way. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for a quart of ice.
A straightforward orange sorbet whose only real technique is the sugar-rub, and whose only real obstacle is the vocabulary. A few notes on the measures and on "the usual way".
- Rub the rind, gentlyDragging sugar lumps over the zest extracts the oil without any of the white pith beneath, which is where the bitterness lives. The book's own warning is the hinge of the recipe: press lightly, stop as soon as the lumps are stained orange, and do not go back for a second pass.
- Imperial measuresCassell's pints are imperial: a pint is 20 fl oz, half a pint 10 fl oz. So roughly 300 ml water and 600 ml of the sugar syrup, against the juice of six oranges and a lemon, which will give you somewhere near 400 ml.
- Clarified sugarVictorian "clarified sugar" is a sugar syrup boiled with a little egg white and skimmed to remove the impurities in unrefined loaf sugar. Modern granulated sugar needs no clarifying; a plain syrup of sugar and water, boiled to dissolve and cooled, is a reasonable stand-in.
- Check the sweetness before freezingA pint of syrup to the juice of six oranges is a wide target, since oranges vary enormously. Taste the mix cold: it should be noticeably sweeter than you want the finished ice, because freezing mutes sugar. Too little sugar and it sets rock hard; too much and it never sets at all.
- "Freeze in the usual way"At the time this meant a pewter or tin freezing pot packed in broken ice and coarse salt, turned by hand and scraped down with a spatula. An ice-cream machine does the same job. Without one, freeze in a shallow tray and break up the crystals with a fork every 30 minutes for three or four hours.
- Strain twiceThe instruction to strain appears twice: once for the flavoured syrup after the sugar lumps are dissolved, and again for the finished mix before freezing. Pulp and membrane freeze into gritty fibres, so it is worth sieving the juice as well.
- Yield and servingA quart, as stated, so about 1.1 litres, which serves six to eight. Best eaten within a day or two: with no fat and no stabiliser, it goes coarse and icy in the freezer fairly quickly.
Water ices reached English cookbooks by way of Italy and France, and by the time Cassell's was compiled in the later nineteenth century they were common in households with access to ice, appearing between courses or at the end of dinner as a lighter alternative to the cream ices. The sugar-rubbing trick here is what apothecaries and confectioners called oleo-saccharum, in which sugar crystals abrade the peel and absorb the citrus oil directly, a method that predates any mechanical zester. The "probable cost, 1s" is characteristic of Cassell's, which priced nearly every dish so that a mistress could budget and check her cook; a shilling for a quart of ice puts this among the cheaper sweets in the book, oranges being a common winter import by then.