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Orange Water Ice
Add rind of one orange, one half cup orange juice, two tablespoons lemon juice, to Plain Water Ice.
A one-line variation that depends entirely on the Plain Water Ice recipe printed alongside it in the same section. Read that one first; everything below assumes a boiled sugar syrup base.
- The missing baseWater ices of this period ran roughly one part sugar to two to four parts water, boiled briefly into a syrup and cooled before freezing. Use the book's own Plain Water Ice proportions rather than guessing, since the sugar level is what keeps the finished ice scoopable.
- "Rind" means zestPare the orange thin with a peeler or rasp and take no white pith, which is bitter. Steep the rind in the hot syrup as it cools, then strain it out before freezing; the oils in the rind carry a good deal of the orange aroma.
- Juice quantitiesHalf a cup of orange juice is about two medium oranges, and two tablespoons of lemon is roughly one lemon. Add both after the syrup has cooled, since heating fresh citrus juice dulls it.
- Why the lemon is thereIt is not a flavour note so much as a corrective. Oranges vary widely in sweetness and acidity, so taste before freezing and add a little more lemon if the mixture seems flat.
- FreezingThe original assumes a hand-crank freezer packed with ice and rock salt. An ice cream machine does the same work in 20 to 30 minutes; without one, freeze in a shallow metal pan and rake it with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours for a granita texture.
- Chill before churningThe mixture should be refrigerator-cold, not merely cool, when it goes into the machine. A warm base churns slowly and throws coarse ice crystals.
- YieldThe finished quantity depends on the book's Plain Water Ice, which is not reproduced here. Serve it the day it is made; water ices set hard and grainy after a night in a modern freezer.
Water ices reached American cookbooks by way of Italy and France, where sorbetto and sorbet were generally, though never very strictly, associated with a sweetened fruit juice frozen without dairy, and by the late nineteenth century they were standard in the frozen-dessert chapter of any general household manual. Lowney's Cook Book, published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston as a promotional volume for its chocolate, still carried a full complement of ordinary recipes, and its frozen section follows the usual pattern of one plain formula followed by a string of short variations that change only the flavouring. An orange ice was a plausible home dish in this period because Florida and California fruit moved by refrigerated rail to northern cities through the winter, and because the domestic ice-and-salt freezer had become cheap enough to be commonplace. Such ices were known to be served between courses at a formal dinner as well as at the end of one.