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Orange Pekoe Ice Cream
2 cups milk 3 tablespoons Orange Pekoe tea Yolks 4 eggs ¼ teaspoon salt 1½ cups sugar Grated rind 1 orange 1 pint heavy cream Scald milk to which tea had been added, and let stand five minutes. Add sugar, and egg yolks slightly beaten, and cook until mixture thickens. Strain, add remaining ingredients, freeze, and mould. Serve garnished with Candied Orange Peel (p. 547).
A custard-based ice cream flavored by steeping black tea directly in the scalding milk. The tea and the citrus rind do all the work, so both need attention.
- Steep, do not stewFive minutes in milk just off the boil is enough for 3 tablespoons of loose Orange Pekoe. Longer extraction pulls tannin, which turns the finished cream bitter and slightly astringent on the tongue.
- Orange Pekoe is a leaf gradeThe term describes leaf size in a black tea, not an orange flavoring. Any decent loose-leaf Ceylon or Assam works; the orange note here comes from the grated rind.
- Cooking the custard"Cook until mixture thickens" means a stirred custard over low heat or a double boiler, to about 175-180F, when it coats a spoon. Take it off before it approaches a simmer or the yolks will curdle and no straining will fully rescue the texture.
- The salt quantityRead the salt as 1/4 teaspoon. It is there to sharpen the tea and sugar, not to be tasted.
- SugarA cup and a half of sugar in roughly a quart of base is on the sweet side by current taste, but sugar also keeps the ice cream scoopable. Cutting it much below a cup will tend to give a harder, icier result.
- Add the cream coldStrain the hot custard, stir in the cream and orange rind, then chill thoroughly before churning. Freezing a warm base in a modern machine wastes the freezing capacity and gives a coarse grain.
- Freezing and mouldingThe original assumes a hand-cranked salt-and-ice freezer, then packing the soft cream into a mould buried in ice and salt to ripen and firm. A machine plus two to three hours in a loaf pan or metal mould in the freezer accomplishes the same thing.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 quarts, serving eight to ten.
Ice cream of this period was churned in a salt-and-ice freezer, then packed into a mould to ripen and firm. The garnish of candied orange peel is cross-referenced to another page in the same book.