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Orange Ice (Juice of six oranges grated)
Juice of six oranges, grated peel of three, juice of two lemons, one pint of sugar, one pint of water, and freeze.
A five-ingredient water ice from the era of the hand-cranked freezer, written for cooks who already knew what "and freeze" involved. The proportions are sound; the technique is all that needs filling in.
- What the volumes meanA pint of sugar is a measure by volume, not weight: about 2 cups, roughly 14 oz. With a pint of water and the juice of six oranges and two lemons, you land near 4 cups of liquid to 2 cups of sugar, which is the right sugar load for a scoopable ice rather than a block.
- Make a syrup firstDissolve the sugar in the pint of water over heat, add the grated peel off the heat, and let it steep until cool. Undissolved sugar will not distribute evenly in a cold mix, and the peel gives up far more aroma to warm syrup than to cold juice.
- Peel, not pithGrated peel of three oranges means the coloured zest only. Anything white turns the ice bitter, and the ice cannot be tasted and corrected once it is frozen.
- StrainStrain out the zest and any pulp before freezing. Shreds of peel freeze hard and read as stringy in the mouth.
- FreezingIn its own day this went into a pail freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt and was cranked until stiff. An ice cream machine does the same job. Without one, freeze in a shallow metal pan and stir hard with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours, which gives a granita texture rather than a smooth ice.
- Serve soonThere is no egg, dairy or alcohol here to keep it soft, so it sets very firm in a modern freezer. Let it stand 10 minutes before serving, or serve it straight from the churn as it was meant to be.
- YieldAbout a quart and a half, or six to eight small servings in the period manner, where an ice was a course rather than a dessert portion.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago in the mid-1870s from recipes contributed by local housewives, sold to raise money for the Home for the Friendless, and it is often described as a model for the American charitable cookbook. Water ices like this one belonged to the formal dinner rather than the nursery: a citrus ice was often served between courses to clear the palate, or as the last sweet thing before coffee. Its presence in a subscription cookbook says something about both the fruit and the equipment. Oranges reached Midwestern markets by rail in quantity by the 1870s, and the hand-cranked freezer with an inner can and a salt-and-ice jacket, generally traced to Nancy Johnson's patent of the 1840s, had by then become cheap enough that a contributor could write "and freeze" without further explanation.