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Orange Ice-Cream
Put the rinds of two oranges rubbed off with three-fourth pound of sugar into a saucepan, add the yolks of eight eggs, the juice of six oranges, and a little salt, stir well over the fire until the mixture thickens, working it briskly; then pour it into a mould packed in ice, freeze, and when wanted turn out onto a dish, and serve very cold.
This is an egg-yolk custard sharpened with orange juice and frozen hard in a mould — closer to a rich frozen zabaglione than to modern dairy ice cream, since there is no milk or cream in it at all. The whole dish turns on how you handle the eggs against that much acid.
- The hinge: do not let it curdleEight yolks in this much orange juice will scramble the moment the mixture nears a simmer, and acid lowers the temperature at which yolks set. Cook it in a bowl over barely simmering water, stirring constantly, until it coats a spoon (about 180F), then strain it through a fine sieve at once and cool it over ice.
- Rubbing the rinds"Rinds rubbed off with sugar" means abrading the zest of two oranges directly into the sugar, either with a rasp or by rubbing whole sugar lumps over the fruit. The sugar draws out the peel oils — the same principle as an oleo-saccharum. Modern equivalent: zest finely, work it into the sugar with your fingers, and let it stand 20 minutes before use.
- Weights and quantitiesThree-quarter pound of sugar is about 1 3/4 cups. The juice of six oranges runs roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups depending on variety and size; taste and hold back a little if your oranges are very sweet, since sugar this heavy will keep the mixture soft.
- "Freeze" in a mould packed in iceThe sealed mould was packed in a tub of crushed ice and coarse salt and left to set solid — a still-frozen bombe, not churned. An ice cream maker gives a smoother result; if you still-freeze, stir the mixture thoroughly every 30 minutes for the first two hours to break up crystals.
- Texture to expectWith no cream and no whipped egg white, this sets dense and hard rather than light. Period bombe and mousse mixtures sometimes had whipped cream or a meringue folded in before moulding; the recipe as printed does not, and the result is intense.
- UnmouldingDip the mould in cool water for a few seconds and invert onto a chilled dish. The heavy sugar keeps the freezing point low, so it softens fast — bring it to the table straight from the ice, as the recipe says.
- YieldAbout a quart, which serves six to eight given the richness.
Frozen orange creams and water-ices were a fixture of grand hotel dining long before Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms, and the technique here — a stirred custard set in a sealed mould buried in ice and salt — is the pre-mechanical method that European confectioners had used since the eighteenth century. What dates the recipe is the labour behind it: rubbing sugar over orange peel to capture the oils, hand-squeezing six oranges, and whisking eight yolks over a coal range were all trivial tasks in a kitchen with a brigade. The absence of cream is worth noting: nineteenth-century menus often distinguished, if inconsistently, between an ice, a water-ice and an ice cream, and this one, despite its title, sits between the categories — enriched with yolks but carrying no dairy at all.