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Orange Ice
4 cups water. 2 cups sugar. 2 cups orange juice. 1/4 cup lemon juice Grated rind of two oranges Make syrup as for Lemon Ice; add fruit juice and grated rind; cool, strain, and freeze.
This entry is a cross-reference rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you have the Lemon Ice formula a few lines above it, and as printed here the orange juice and the syrup quantities are missing entirely. Read it as a variation, not a complete set of directions.
- What is missingOnly the lemon juice and rind are given. The water and sugar come from the Lemon Ice recipe that this one refers back to, and the quantity of orange juice is simply absent from the text as printed here, so the page cannot be followed on its own.
- "Make syrup"This means boiling the sugar and water together, not making a heavy candy syrup; the timing is given in the Lemon Ice recipe, not here. Boil it too long and you reduce the water, which throws off the sugar balance and gives a hard, crunchy ice.
- Add juice off the heatThe instruction to cool before freezing matters more than it looks. Citrus juice boiled with the syrup loses its fresh aroma and turns faintly cooked and bitter; add juice and rind to the hot syrup, then chill thoroughly before churning.
- The rindGrate only the coloured zest of the two oranges and stop at the white pith. The rind steeps in the syrup for flavour and is then removed at the straining step, so a fine grater and a fine sieve both help.
- "Freeze"In 1896 this meant a hand-crank churn packed with cracked ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt, turned until stiff. A modern ice cream machine does the same job; without one, freeze in a shallow pan and break up the crystals with a fork every 30 minutes for a granita texture.
- Sugar is structuralDo not cut the sugar to taste. In a water ice the sugar is what keeps the mixture scoopable rather than solid; a reduced-sugar version freezes into a block.
- Yield and servingServing -- Water ices of this period were served in glasses between courses or alongside roast meats as much as for dessert. No yield can be given from this page, since the syrup and juice quantities are not printed here.
By the time Fannie Farmer compiled the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book in 1896 the chapter on ices ran to many flavours built on one repeated pattern: sugar syrup, fruit juice, freeze. That is why this entry is so short. The book is organised as a teaching text for the Boston Cooking School, and once the Lemon Ice has demonstrated the method, the other fruit ices follow as brief variations on it, in the expectation that the reader has learned the base and needs only the substitution. The lemon juice retained in an orange ice is not decorative: oranges alone are low in acid, and the sharper juice keeps the finished ice from tasting flat. Both the fruit and the ice itself were commercial goods by this date, with Florida and California citrus moving by rail and natural ice cut in winter and stored in insulated ice houses for summer use, which is what made a chapter of frozen desserts practical for an ordinary city kitchen.