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Orange Ice Cream
Add one cup orange juice and one half cup orange pulp to Philadelphia Ice Cream. Flavor with one teaspoon vanilla and one tablespoon lemon juice. Freeze.
A one-line variation that assumes you have already turned to the Philadelphia Ice Cream entry earlier in the section. Almost everything that can go wrong here is a matter of acid meeting cream.
- What the base isPhiladelphia ice cream is uncooked: cream, sugar and vanilla, with no eggs and no custard. The proportions in books of this period run around a quart of cream to a cup of sugar. Look up the base recipe in this same section rather than substituting a cooked custard, which would make a different and heavier dish.
- The hinge: acid curdles creamA cup of orange juice plus a tablespoon of lemon juice into raw sweetened cream can flocculate it if the juice is cold, dumped in at once, or the cream is anywhere near turning. Pour the juice into the cream in a thin stream while stirring steadily. Some cooks avoid the problem entirely by adding the fruit when the base is already half frozen.
- Orange pulpHalf a cup of pulp means the flesh worked free of membrane and seeds, not zest and not whole segments. Membrane freezes into tough threads. Squeeze the juice from three or four oranges and supreme one or two more for the pulp.
- The vanilla is doubled upThe base already carries vanilla, and this adds a further teaspoon. If your base is generously vanillaed, cut this back or the orange reads as muted.
- "Freeze" meant a crank freezerIn 1907 this was a wooden bucket packed with three parts crushed ice to one part rock salt, cranked twenty to thirty minutes, then packed to ripen an hour or two. Any modern churn does the same work; chill the base thoroughly first, since a warm base overruns and goes fluffy.
- Expect a firmer, icier freezeA cup and a half of fruit dilutes the fat and adds water, so this sets harder than plain Philadelphia ice cream and gets crumbly straight from a home freezer. A little extra sugar in the base, or a tablespoon of orange liqueur, keeps it scoopable. Let it stand ten minutes before serving.
- YieldWith a quart-of-cream base, roughly a scant two quarts finished, serving eight to ten.
Philadelphia ice cream is the American name for the plain uncooked style: sweetened cream, frozen, with nothing but flavoring added, as opposed to the French or Neapolitan sort thickened with egg yolks. Nineteenth-century writers treated it as the more honest of the two, and the term is generally traced to the city's reputation for exceptionally good dairy in the decades when ice cream became a commercial trade there. Lowney's Cook Book, published by a Boston chocolate manufacturer, gives one full base recipe and then a run of one-sentence variations hung off it, of which this orange version is one. That a book could casually call for a cup of fresh orange juice in 1907 is suggestive of how far citrus traveled by that date, though the often-repeated notion that a generation earlier oranges were still largely a Christmas luxury in the Northeast is more folklore than settled fact.