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Orange Granite Ice
Remove the peels from six or eight oranges, cut them up into quarters, and take out the inner pith and pips. Place them in a basin, and pour over three pints of syrup at 20 degrees, let them remain for two hours, remove and place them on a strainer to drain. Pass the syrup through a sieve into the freezer, and when frozen to icicles add the drained quarters of oranges and cover. Let it remain twenty minutes longer, then serve in glasses or cups.
A water ice in the old French style, built on a graded sugar syrup and a hand-cranked pail freezer. Two things need translating: the syrup density and the deliberately coarse texture.
- "Syrup at 20 degrees"This is degrees Baumé, read off a saccharometer, not an oven or thermometer reading. Twenty Baumé is a light syrup of roughly 36 percent sugar by weight — in practice about 1 lb sugar dissolved in a generous pint and a half of water, boiled to dissolve and cooled. If you own a hydrometer, use it; the original assumed every kitchen did.
- Three pintsThree pints is six cups. The recipe gives no yield at all, so how many it served depends entirely on the size of the glasses or cups used.
- "Frozen to icicles"This is the hinge. A granite is not churned smooth -- it is frozen to loose, spiky crystals. In a pail freezer that would have meant cranking slowly and scraping little. At home, freeze the syrup in a wide shallow metal pan and rake it with a fork every 30 minutes until it is uniformly grainy, about three hours.
- Sugar level and hardnessA 20 Baume syrup is on the lighter side, and a leaner syrup freezes harder, which is what lets the ice set in crystals rather than staying slushy. Enriching it much further will tend toward a soft sorbet rather than a granite.
- The oranges"Remove the peels" means peel them, not zest them. Pull away every thread of white pith and the membrane between segments if you have the patience — the two-hour maceration draws juice out of the sections and perfumes the syrup, which is the real point of the step.
- StrainingPass the drained syrup through a fine sieve as directed. Pulp and membrane fragments left in will freeze into hard specks and spoil the clean crystal texture.
- The final twenty minutesThe drained segments go into the already-frozen ice and rest, covered, only long enough to chill through. Longer and they freeze solid; fruit at that stage should still yield to the spoon.
- ServingServe in chilled coupes or stemmed glasses straight from the freezer. Granité slumps quickly at room temperature, so plate it at the last moment.
Granité is the French rendering of the Italian granita — literally "grainy" — and by the 1890s it had settled into the American hotel menu as an intermezzo, a small unwhipped water ice served between the heavy courses of a long dinner to reset the palate before the roast. Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf, published his book in 1896 as a compendium of the hotel's professional kitchen, and instructions of this kind — "syrup at 20 degrees" — assume a reader who worked with a Baumé saccharometer and knew the graded syrup densities by name. The recipe also shows how ices were made in a hand-cranked pail packed with ice and rock salt, as hotels still did in this period, where the coarse crystalline texture the French called granité was as much a consequence of the equipment as a matter of style.