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Orange Ice
Peel six sweet oranges and steep the rind in a quart of boiling water for twenty minutes. In another vessel cook into a syrup the juice of the oranges and of one lemon, with a pint and a half of sugar and teacup of water. Add this to the strained liquor from the peel; stir; set aside and let cool. When cool add the strained juice of the fruit and freeze. This may be made without the peel, making a simple, strong orangeade and freezing.
A water ice from the era of the hand-cranked freezer, written loosely enough that the quantities need a second look before you start.
- The contradiction to resolve firstThe recipe has you cook the orange and lemon juice into the syrup, then later "add the strained juice of the fruit" again. Six oranges will not yield juice twice. Make the syrup with sugar and water only, add the lemon juice to it, and stir in the strained orange juice after everything has cooled — heating fresh orange juice dulls its flavour, so keeping it out of the pan is the better reading.
- Pint and a half of sugarSugar was measured by volume, so this is 3 cups, roughly 21 oz or 600 g. That is a lot against about 2 cups of orange juice and a quart of peel infusion; it produces a sweet, soft-setting ice. Reducing it to 2 to 2¼ cups gives a cleaner orange flavour, though the ice will freeze harder.
- Teacup of waterA teacup in period recipes runs from ½ to ¾ cup; ⅔ cup is a safe reading here, and the exact figure hardly matters since it is only there to dissolve the sugar.
- Peel, not pithSteep only the coloured zest. Any white pith carried into the quart of boiling water turns the infusion bitter over twenty minutes, and bitterness is far more obvious in a frozen ice than in a hot drink.
- Chill thoroughly, not just to cool"Let cool" meant cool enough for the ice-and-salt freezer. Refrigerate the mixture to 40°F or below before churning; a barely-cool base melts the ice bath and gives a coarse, grainy texture.
- Freezing without a crank freezerAn ice cream machine handles this directly. Without one, freeze in a shallow metal pan and break up the ice crystals with a fork every 30 to 40 minutes until firm — about 3 to 4 hours. Sugar this high keeps it scoopable straight from a home freezer.
- YieldCloser to 2 quarts once the quart of peel infusion, the syrup and the juice are combined. Sweet oranges here means a juicing orange such as Valencia; navels are fine but their juice turns bitter if it stands, so use it promptly.
Water ices — fruit juice, sugar syrup and no dairy — were a common frozen sweet of the nineteenth-century American table, cheaper and lighter than ice cream, and served both between courses and at the end of a meal. Their spread depended on two things: the commercial ice trade, which by the mid-nineteenth century was putting harvested lake ice into city households and hotels, and the hand-cranked freezer with its ice-and-salt jacket, which brought freezing within reach of an ordinary kitchen. Oranges arriving by rail from Florida and California widened the season for citrus ices. The instruction to steep the peel reflects a habit common in fruit cookery of the period: the zest holds the aromatic oils that the juice alone lacks, and an infusion was one way to get them out before bottled extracts were dependable. The closing note — that you may skip the peel and simply freeze a strong orangeade — offers a careful version and a plain one side by side.