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Melon Water Ice
Pound eight ounces of ripe melon in a mortar and add two ounces of orange-flower water, the juice of two lemons, one breakfast cupful of water and a pint of clarified sugar. Stir the mixture thoroughly and strain through a fine sieve, put in a freezer, and it is ready for use.
A late-nineteenth-century water ice: fruit pulp, syrup, citrus, and a churn packed with ice and salt. The proportions here are built for that machine, and two of them need adjusting before you scale up.
- Orange-flower waterTwo ounces is a quarter cup, which is a very large dose by modern standards; commercial strengths vary and may not match what Oscar's kitchen bought by the bottle. Start with a teaspoon, taste, and add more; at full strength the ice tastes of soap and perfume.
- Clarified sugarThis is sugar syrup boiled with a little egg white or water and skimmed of scum, not a modern product. Substitute a plain simple syrup made from equal weights sugar and water, boiled until clear.
- Sweetness and textureA pint of syrup to eight ounces of pulp is a lot of sugar, but sugar is what keeps a water ice scoopable rather than a solid block. If you cut it, expect a harder, icier result and plan to scrape it as a granita.
- The melonThe recipe specifies only "ripe melon"; a muskmelon or cantaloupe suits it better than watermelon, which is mostly water. Eight ounces is the flesh of roughly half a small melon; pick one that smells strongly at the stem end, since underripe melon gives almost no flavour once frozen and sweetened.
- Mortar and sieveA blender or food processor replaces the mortar. Still strain through a fine sieve afterward, pressing the pulp: the fibrous strands from the melon are what make a water ice feel woolly on the tongue.
- "Put in a freezer"The freezer is a hand-crank churn in an ice-and-salt bath, and the constant agitation is the point. In a modern ice cream maker, churn 20 to 30 minutes; without one, freeze in a shallow pan and stir with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours.
- Chill before churningNot stated in the original. Refrigerate the strained mixture until thoroughly cold, or the churn will spend its time cooling the liquid instead of freezing it.
- YieldAbout a quart, perhaps a little more, which is six to eight small servings. Water ices of this period were often served in glasses as an intermediate course, though they also appeared as dessert.
Water ices, with no dairy, are the older branch of the frozen dessert family, reaching European kitchens before custard-based ice creams and long associated with Italian confectioners. By the 1890s a fruit ice was a common feature of an American hotel dinner, served in a small glass partway through a long menu to reset the palate before the roast or game course. Orange-flower water, distilled from bitter orange blossom, was a common flavouring in nineteenth-century American and English pastry work and has since largely retreated to Middle Eastern and North African cooking, which is why the quantity here reads so startlingly today. Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms rather than its stoves, and his 1896 book collects recipes in brief, unfussy form, written for cooks who already knew what a freezer was and how long to crank it.