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Orange Ice
Boil three-quarters of a pound of sugar in one quart of water; when cool add the juice of six oranges; steep the rinds in a little water, strain, and flavor to taste with it. The juice and rind of one or two lemons added to the orange is a great improvement. Freeze like ice-cream.
A simple sorbet built on a boiled sugar syrup. The only real work is getting the proportions right, since the original measures its fruit by the piece.
- The sugarThree-quarters of a pound is about 1 2/3 cups of granulated sugar. Boiled with a quart of water it gives a light syrup; do not reduce it hard, a minute or two at a simmer to dissolve is enough.
- Six orangesModern navels or Valencias give roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups of juice for six fruit. That is the target, whatever the count on your counter.
- Add juice coldThe recipe is explicit that the syrup should be cool before the juice goes in. Heating fresh citrus juice tends to dull its brightness and push it towards a cooked note, so it is worth observing.
- Steeping the rindsPare the zest off in strips with no white pith, which turns the ice bitter, and steep in a few tablespoons of hot water. Strain and add a little at a time until the flavor reads as orange rather than perfume.
- The lemonTake the suggestion. One or two lemons keeps a sugar-heavy fruit ice from tasting flat.
- "Freeze like ice-cream"In 1880s terms this means a hand-crank freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt, turned steadily. A modern churn works directly; without one, freeze in a shallow metal pan and stir the mixture thoroughly with a fork every 30 minutes until it sets as a granita-style ice.
- Texture and storageWith no dairy or egg, this hardens solid in a home freezer. Let it stand 10 minutes at room temperature before scooping, and eat it within a day or two.
- YieldRoughly 1 1/2 to 1 3/4 quarts, serving eight to ten in small glasses.
Water ices and ice cream both appear early in American cookbooks, and by the time The Dixie Cook Book was compiled in the 1880s a chapter of "Ices and Ice-Cream" was a common feature of general domestic manuals. Both depended on the commercial ice trade: harvested lake and river ice, packed in sawdust in an icehouse, sold by the block and broken up with rock salt to bring the freezing mixture below 32F. That is why the book can say "freeze like ice-cream" and assume the reader knows what to do with a crank freezer. Oranges in a Southern kitchen of the period might come from Florida groves, whose commercial shipping was expanding along the new rail lines, or from the imported citrus also widely sold at the time, which made a dessert of six oranges a plausible if still faintly luxurious thing to put in front of guests. The technique itself, sugar syrup plus fruit juice, is essentially unchanged from the sorbetti of eighteenth-century European confectioners.