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Iced Orange Juice
Fill small glass cups with strained orange juice and set each in the center of a soup plate filled with cracked ice. This makes a delicious fruit course for breakfast. It should be sipped from the cup.
Barely a recipe, and none the worse for it: the whole technique is chilling juice in a way that keeps it cold at the table. A few notes on the vessels and the period logic.
- The soup plate is the pointA wide, shallow soup plate holds enough cracked ice to surround the sides of a small glass cup, which is how the juice stays cold without dilution. A shallow bowl or a rimmed dessert plate does the same job.
- "Small glass cups"Roughly 3 to 4 ounces: a punch cup, a small tumbler, or a sherry glass would suit. The recipe specifies nothing beyond "small glass cups."
- Cracked, not cubedCracked ice packs tightly around the cup and makes better contact than cubes. Crush ice coarsely in a towel with a mallet, or use the coarse setting on a machine; fine snow melts too fast and floods the plate.
- Chill everything firstCold juice into cold glasses set in ice. Juice squeezed and served at room temperature takes time to chill through, so the first sips will be warmer than intended.
- Strain properlyThe instruction to strain matters because the juice is meant to be sipped, not spooned. A fine sieve removes pulp and seeds; skip the pulp entirely for the texture the recipe intends.
- YieldOne orange gives roughly 1/4 to 1/3 cup of juice, so figure one to two oranges per cup. Best squeezed shortly before serving — orange juice loses aroma as it stands, and some varieties can turn faintly bitter.
Fruit early in the meal became fashionable in American households in this period, and citrus in particular suggested a well-supplied kitchen: Florida and California oranges reached northern cities by rail in growing quantity in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, and oranges had earlier been more of an occasional treat. Ice carried something of the same suggestion. Domestic ice delivery and the ice-box were widespread in urban homes by about 1900, and cookbooks of the period contain many small ceremonies built around chilling — fruit cups bedded in ice, melon on ice, iced bouillon. The instruction that the juice "should be sipped from the cup" reads as of a piece with the table-manners guidance such books often carried alongside their recipes.