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Orange Ice
(Gelato di aranci) Four big oranges.
One lemon.
One pint of water.
Sugar, 3/4 lb.
Squeeze the oranges and the lemon and strain the juice.
Boil the sugar in the water for ten minutes, put in the juice when cold, strain again and put in the freezer.
A plain water-ice in the Italian style: sugar syrup, citrus juice, nothing else. The proportions are sound and need no adjustment, but the freezing method assumes equipment most kitchens no longer have.
- The measurements in modern termsThree-quarters of a pound of sugar is about 1 2/3 cups (340 g); the pint of water is 2 cups if you read it as American, 20 fl oz if English, and either works here. Four large oranges and one lemon give roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cups of juice.
- "The freezer" is a machine, not an applianceIn a book of this period this meant a hand-crank churn packed with cracked ice and rock salt. Use an ice cream maker, or still-freeze in a shallow metal pan and break up the ice with a fork every 30 minutes until it is uniformly granular.
- Let the syrup cool completelyThis is the hinge of the recipe. Citrus juice added to hot syrup turns dull and faintly cooked, losing the raw brightness that is the whole point of a gelato di aranci. Chill the syrup thoroughly before combining.
- Ten minutes of boiling mattersTen minutes of boiling -- this does more than dissolve the sugar; it concentrates the syrup somewhat, so expect to lose a little volume.
- Do not cut the sugarDo not cut the sugar much -- the sugar here acts as antifreeze as well as sweetener. Reduce it substantially and the ice will freeze harder and be difficult to scoop.
- Straining twice is deliberateOnce after juicing, once after mixing. Pulp and membrane fragments freeze into gritty threads, so use a fine sieve and press nothing through it.
- An optional improvementRub a little orange zest into the sugar before boiling, then strain it out with the second straining. Most of orange aroma lives in the peel oil rather than the juice.
- YieldAbout one quart, or four to six small servings. Serve it the day it is made; a plain water-ice with no stabiliser coarsens noticeably by the second day.
This represents the older, humbler branch of the Italian frozen tradition: gelato here means simply "frozen," not the dense milk-based custard the word now implies abroad. Water ices of exactly this construction — boiled sugar syrup, strained fruit juice, churned over ice and salt — were made in Italian kitchens long before mechanical refrigeration, dependent on winter ice cut and stored in insulated pits, which is often said to be why such ices tended to be a luxury of cities with reliable ice trade. The addition of a single lemon to four oranges is the practical trick of the genre: oranges alone are too flat and sweet, and the lemon's acid sharpens the whole thing without announcing itself.