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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: an orange ice shell filled with a frozen orange custard-cream. The printed ingredient list is defective — the sugar and water called for in the first line never appear in it, and the last three items belong to the recipe that follows.
- The missing syrupThe method opens "Boil sugar and water eight minutes," but no quantities are given anywhere in the list. Any figure used is a reconstruction, not the original.
- Stray lines"1 quart thin cream, 1 box strawberries, 1 cup sugar" is the head of the next recipe in the section, caught by the typesetting. Ignore it here.
- Two kinds of creamThe plain "1 cup cream" is scalded for the custard — light cream or half-and-half. The "1 cup heavy cream" is whipped and folded in at the end. Do not combine them.
- The custard is the hingeCook the yolks and scalded cream over hot water, not direct heat, and stop at 170-175F when it coats a spoon. Add the orange mixture only after the custard is fully cold; hot custard meeting two cups of acidic juice is liable to curdle.
- Freezing without a crank freezer"Freeze" means a salt-and-ice hand freezer. A modern ice cream machine churns it in 20–30 minutes; still-freezing in a shallow pan works too, stirred every 30 minutes, though the texture will be denser.
- Packing the mouldLine a chilled melon mould with a firm layer of orange ice, fill with the frozen delicious, cover tightly, and bury in a 3:1 mixture of crushed ice and rock salt for the stated hour and a half. A home freezer at 0F will do much the same job in three to four hours, uncovered by salt.
- Candied peelFold it in when the mixture is nearly set, as directed, so it stays suspended rather than sinking. Chop it finer than shop-bought strips if it is stiff — hard peel freezes to gravel.
- YieldRoughly a quart and a half of filling with its ice lining; eight to ten small servings.
Frozen desserts built in a lined mould — a shell of water ice around a richer cream — were a familiar company sweet of the American table in the decades either side of 1900, and the form is generally traced to the French bombe glacée of the professional confectioner. Names like "Orange Delicious" belong to the domestic-science kitchen rather than the restaurant one: Fannie Farmer's book, first published in 1896 out of the Boston Cooking School, translated hotel work into recipes a household with a hand-cranked freezer and a supply of ice could manage. That supply is the real subject here. Packing a mould in salt and ice for ninety minutes assumed an icebox, an ice delivery, and a cook willing to crank.