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Orange Ice Cream
Four oranges, one gallon cream. Rub four or five lumps of sugar on the orange peel, squeeze the juice out, put the lumps of sugar in it and pour into the cream. Sweeten heavily with pulverized sugar before freezing.--Mrs. M.
Four ingredients and no custard, which makes this a Philadelphia-style ice cream: uncooked, unthickened, wholly dependent on the cream. Two things need attention before you start — the volume, and the fact that orange juice curdles sweet cream.
- The hinge: acid meets creamCitrus juice will clabber raw cream on contact, and the effect worsens as the mixture sits. Chill both components hard, stir the juice in immediately before the mixture goes into the freezer, and keep it moving. If it does break, the churning will not repair it.
- Scale it downOne gallon of cream yields something close to five quarts of finished ice cream, enough for twenty to thirty people. For a modern 1.5-quart machine, use 1 quart heavy cream (or half cream, half whole milk), the zest and juice of 1 orange, and roughly 3/4 cup sugar.
- The sugar lumps are a technique, not a quirkRubbing hard sugar cubes over the peel strips the fragrant oil from the zest — the same principle as an oleo-saccharum. A fine microplane zest muddled with the sugar for a few minutes does the same job. Avoid the white pith, which is bitter.
- "Pulverized sugar"Nineteenth-century pulverized sugar is finely ground granulated, not modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch. Superfine or caster sugar is the closest match and dissolves without cooking.
- How heavy is "heavily"No quantity is given. Figure about 3/4 to 1 cup of sugar per quart of cream; the unfrozen mixture should taste distinctly too sweet, since cold mutes sweetness considerably.
- Freezing without a machineThe original assumes a hand-crank freezer packed with crushed ice and rock salt at roughly three parts ice to one part salt, cranked twenty to thirty minutes. A modern canister machine or the still-freeze method — freeze in a shallow pan, beating thoroughly three or four times as it sets — both work.
- Oranges then and nowPeriod oranges were smaller, seedier and more acidic than a supermarket navel. If your fruit is very sweet, a squeeze of lemon sharpens the flavor; if it is very juicy, hold back some juice rather than thinning the cream.
- ServingPhiladelphia-style ice cream has no eggs or stabilizers and sets rock-hard. Let it stand ten minutes at room temperature before scooping, and eat it the day it is made.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, is a collection of contributions from named and initialed Virginia housekeepers — hence "Mrs. M." By the 1870s commercial ice harvesting and the hand-crank freezer patented in the 1840s had turned frozen cream from a plantation luxury requiring an ice house into something a household could produce on a summer afternoon. The style here, cream and fruit and sugar with no cooked custard base, is what confectioners came to call Philadelphia ice cream, and the trick of rubbing sugar lumps on citrus peel is older still, carried into American cookbooks from English and French confectionery practice where it was the standard way to capture the oil of an orange or lemon before extracts were sold in bottles.