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Orange Delicious
2 cups sugar 1 cup water 2 cups orange juice 1 cup cream Yolks two eggs 1 cup heavy cream 1/4 cup shredded candied orange peel Boil sugar and water eight minutes, then add orange juice. Scald cream, add yolks of eggs, and cook over hot water until mixture thickens. Cool, add to first mixture with heavy cream beaten stiff. Freeze; when nearly frozen, add orange peel. Line a melon mould with Orange Ice, fill with Orange Delicious, pack in salt and ice, and let stand one and one-half hours.
This is a bombe: a frozen custard-and-orange cream set inside a shell of orange ice. The hinge is the custard, which must thicken over hot water and never approach a boil, or the yolks curdle and no amount of freezing will smooth them out.
- The syrupTwo cups sugar boiled with one cup water for eight minutes will give a fairly heavy syrup, probably somewhere near the thread stage, though the book gives only a time and no temperature. Let it cool fully before it meets the custard.
- Custard temperatureScald the first cup of cream to about 180F, temper it into the yolks, and cook over simmering water until it coats a spoon, 170-175F. Strain it as a matter of course.
- Two different creamsThe scalded cup is the custard base; the second cup of heavy cream is whipped stiff and folded in cold. Do not combine them at the same stage.
- FreezingWritten for a hand-cranked freezer packed with one part rock salt to three or four parts crushed ice. A modern ice cream machine does the same work; churn until thick, then fold in the candied peel by hand so it does not shred.
- MouldingChill the melon mould hard, press a half-inch lining of orange ice up the sides with the back of a cold spoon, fill the centre with the Orange Delicious, cover, and pack in salt and ice for the hour and a half the recipe allows. A home freezer can stand in for the pack, with the timing judged by firmness.
- UnmouldingDip the mould in cool water for a few seconds and turn it out onto a chilled dish. Slice across the melon so each portion shows the ring of ice around the cream.
- YieldThe listed quantities come to something over a quart and a half once the cream is whipped in, enough for eight to ten as part of a dessert course.
- Candied peelShop candied orange peel is often dry and hard; soften it briefly in warm syrup or a spoonful of orange juice and blot it before adding, or it will freeze into gritty chips.
Frozen bombes lined with a contrasting ice were a fixture of American dinner-party cookery from roughly the 1890s through the 1920s, when hand-cranked freezers and melon and pyramid moulds were sold for household use. The form is generally traced to French confectionery practice, where a bombe glacée paired an outer sorbet shell with a richer custard or mousse centre.