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Orange Ice
Mrs. Carson.
Six oranges, juice of all, and grated peel of three, two lemons, the juice only, one pint of sugar, dissolved in one pint of water; prepare and freeze as you would lemon ice.
A three-line recipe that assumes you already know how to freeze an ice — which most cooks in the 1870s did, since the hand-crank freezer was standard kitchen equipment. The proportions are sound and translate directly.
- A pint of sugar is a volume, not a weightMany nineteenth-century American and Canadian recipes measured sugar by volume rather than by weight. One pint is two cups, roughly 14 oz / 400 g of granulated sugar, dissolved in two cups of water.
- What you actually end up withSix oranges give roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups of juice, two lemons about 1/3 cup. A pint of sugar dissolved in a pint of water yields closer to 2 1/2 cups of syrup, so the whole comes to about five cups — a little over a quart. It will freeze harder than a modern sorbet because there is no invert sugar or alcohol in it.
- Handle the peel as an infusionGrate the zest of three oranges into the sugar and water, heat just to dissolve, then let it stand off the heat until cool and strain it out. Left in, the grated peel gives a gritty texture and turns bitter as it sits in the freezer.
- Strain the juice tooPulp and membrane freeze into fibrous threads. Pass the combined juices through a sieve before mixing with the syrup.
- "Prepare and freeze as you would lemon ice"That meant a pail-and-crank freezer packed with cracked ice and coarse salt, cranked until the paddle stiffened. An ice-cream machine does the same job; failing that, freeze in a shallow metal pan and break up the crystals with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours, which yields a granita rather than a smooth ice.
- Chill before churningThe syrup must be thoroughly cold when it goes into the machine. Warm mixture melts the surrounding ice and you get coarse crystals instead of a fine grain.
- Modern oranges are sweeterModern oranges are probably sweeter -- Commercial navels are generally bred for high sugar and low acid, though how they compare with the fruit shipped north in the 1870s is not documented. Taste the mixture cold before freezing; a little extra lemon juice sharpens it without changing the texture.
- ServingRipen it an hour in the freezer after churning, then let it sit a few minutes at room temperature before scooping. Victorian tables served ices between courses or as a light finish in small stemmed glasses.
Water ices reached ordinary middle-class tables in the second half of the nineteenth century for one reason: the commercial ice trade. Blocks cut from northern lakes in winter and stored in sawdust-packed icehouses made freezing a domestic possibility rather than a confectioner's trick, and the hand-cranked freezer — patented in various forms from the 1840s onward — put the churn in the kitchen. An orange ice was the cheapest kind of luxury a hostess could offer: no cream, no eggs, no cooking beyond dissolving sugar, and citrus that arrived by rail in winter when it was most impressive. The Home Cook Book, compiled in Toronto in 1877 from contributions by named local women and sold to raise money for the Hospital for Sick Children, is full of exactly this sort of entry — signed, brief, and written on the assumption that the reader has made a lemon ice before and needs only the proportions.