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Orange Flower Ices
The simple ice, sherbet, cream, or custard may be made by using the Introductory Recipes for ices and flavouring with the syrup of Preserved Orange Flowers, or the recipe for Orange Ice under the Sweet Orange may be used, as liked, flavoured with Orange Flower Syrup, or Orange Flower Water. "OLD BALDY" AND NAVEL ORANGES FROM THE
This is a flavouring variation rather than a standalone recipe: it points you at the book's basic ice, sherbet, cream and custard bases and tells you to scent them with orange flower. The whole thing turns on how much floral flavouring goes in, and the original gives no figure.
- What to use as a baseAny plain vanilla-style custard ice, a fruit sherbet (fruit juice, sugar syrup, water), or a sweetened cream base will stand in for the book's "Introductory Recipes." For an orange-flower ice, a simple syrup sherbet or a light cooked custard shows the perfume best; heavy cream mutes it.
- Orange flower water is not interchangeable with syrupPreserved orange flower syrup is sweet and mild; distilled orange flower water is concentrated and can taste soapy or metallic if overdone. Start at 1/2 to 1 teaspoon of orange flower water per quart of base, or 2 to 3 tablespoons of syrup, and taste before freezing.
- Taste it coldFreezing flattens aromatics noticeably. Chill the base thoroughly and judge the flavour when it is cold, expecting to want it a shade stronger than seems right at room temperature.
- Add the flavouring off the heatOrange flower water is volatile and will cook away. Stir it into a custard or syrup base after it has cooled, not while it is simmering.
- Sugar and textureA sherbet-style ice needs roughly 20 to 25 percent sugar by weight of the total mixture to churn smooth; too little and you get a solid block. Period recipes of this sort assumed a hand-cranked freezer packed with ice and coarse salt, which without steady scraping could give a coarser, more granular ice than a modern machine.
- YieldA quart of finished ice will serve six to eight. Serve in glasses rather than bowls; the perfume fades as it softens.
- The stray line at the end"OLD BALDY" AND NAVEL ORANGES FROM THE reads as a truncated illustration caption from the page rather than part of the method. Ignore it.
Orange flower water is one of the oldest surviving traces of medieval Arab and Persian confectionery in European cooking: bitter orange (Seville) blossoms are steam-distilled, the aqueous portion drawn off as orange flower water while the essential oil that separates from the distillate, neroli, goes to perfumery. It is generally thought to have reached European kitchens through Spain and Sicily and was, by the eighteenth century, one of the common sweet flavourings in English and American baking, doing some of the work vanilla later took over. Books of this period, organised by fruit, could give the lemon and orange sections a cluster of blossom-scented preparations alongside the juice ones, and cross-referenced them to a set of "introductory" base recipes rather than repeating quantities. The reference to "Old Baldy" and navel oranges suggests the book belongs to the era of the booming Florida and California citrus industries, when orange blossom was still something a household might preserve in syrup at home.