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Orange Water Ice
1 quart water 2 cups sugar 2 cups orange juice 1/4 cup lemon juice Chipped rind of 2 oranges Chip off the pieces of orange rind with a knife, being careful not to get any of the white portion. Prepare a syrup from the water and sugar, and let the orange rind boil in it. Strain through a cheesecloth, and add to the fruit juices. Chill and freeze.
A straightforward sorbet in all but name, from an era when "freeze" meant packing a canister in ice and rock salt. The proportions are sound; the only real work is deciding how you will churn it.
- YieldRoughly 1 3/4 quarts before freezing, which serves eight to ten as a small course. It will overfill a standard 1 1/2-quart ice cream machine canister, so freeze in two batches or scale down by a third.
- Freezing without a freezerThe original assumes a hand-crank freezer surrounded by cracked ice and coarse salt. A modern ice cream maker handles it directly. Without one, pour into a shallow metal pan, freeze, and rake with a fork every 30 minutes for about 3 hours for a granita texture.
- Chipped rindThis is zest, taken off in thin strips with a paring knife or peeler. The warning about the white pith is the important one here: albedo turns the syrup bitter, and there is nothing to hide it behind.
- Boiling the syrupThe recipe gives no time. Bring the water and sugar to a boil with the rind, hold it at a simmer 5 minutes to draw out the oils, then take it off the heat. A long hard boil concentrates the sugar and will leave the ice cloying and slow to set.
- Add the juice coldCool the strained syrup before combining it with the orange and lemon juice. Hot syrup drives off the fresh volatile oils that make the difference between this and orange candy.
- Sugar is structureTwo cups of sugar to a quart of water is not merely sweetness; sugar lowers the freezing point and keeps the ice from setting into a solid block. Cutting it substantially will give you an unspoonable brick.
- JuiceRoughly 5 to 6 juicing oranges and one lemon. Fresh juice matters more than usual, since nothing is cooked into it.
- RipeningLet the churned ice sit in the freezer 1 to 2 hours before serving so it firms and the flavour settles, then soften 5 minutes at room temperature before scooping.
Water ices were the plain sister of ice cream in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookery: fruit juice, sugar syrup and water, with no dairy and no eggs, frozen in the same crank freezer that produced the richer custards. That absence of meat, dairy and eggs would suit a book of meatless cookery, where the compilers needed desserts that stayed within various forms of abstinence, whether vegetarian, Lenten or simply the household economy of a day without butcher's meat. Ices were also served in the middle of long formal dinners as a palate cleanser, a role the citrus here suits well. The technique itself is older than the book by centuries, having reached English and American tables by way of Italian and French confectioners, and the name survived in cookbooks well into the twentieth century before "sorbet" largely displaced it.