Orange Ice
3 cups Karo, Red Label 4 cups water 1/2 cup sugar 3 tablespoons lemon juice 2½ cups orange juice Grated rind one orange Combine, pour into a freezer and freeze as usual, packing with three parts of crushed ice to one part of rock salt.
A hand-cranked ice from a corn syrup promotional booklet. The syrup is doing technical work here, not just sweetening, which is worth understanding before you change anything.
- Karo Red LabelRed Label was the golden, slightly caramel-flavored grade of Karo, a corn syrup cut with refiners' syrup; the Blue Label was the near-colorless one. Neither is sold under those names now. Light corn syrup is the closest match, and a tablespoon or two of molasses will approximate Red Label's darker note if you want it.
- Why so much syrupThree cups of corn syrup is the hinge of the recipe. Its glucose and dextrins depress the freezing point and interfere with crystal growth, so the ice stays softer and more scoopable than it otherwise would. Cut the syrup and you get a harder, coarser ice.
- Sweetness, by modern tasteTotal sugars here run well above what a current sorbet recipe would use — about 3½ cups of sweetener to 6½ cups of liquid. If that reads as cloying, reduce the plain sugar first and leave the syrup alone, and expect a firmer texture.
- "A freezer" means a churnThis is the bucket-and-dasher type: a metal can inside a wooden pail, packed with ice and salt, cranked by hand. Any modern churn works, and the ice-and-salt instruction is irrelevant to a machine with a frozen bowl or a built-in compressor.
- Three to one, ice to rock saltPeriod manuals treated the salt proportion as a matter of judgement: more salt drives the brine colder and freezes the mix faster, which they warned produced a coarser ice, while three parts crushed ice to one part rock salt gives a slower freeze. Use coarse rock salt or ice-cream salt, not table salt.
- Strain and chill firstPress the juice through a fine sieve to catch pulp and seeds, and refrigerate the mixture until cold before churning. Zest the orange before juicing it, and grate finely — long shreds are unpleasant in a frozen ice.
- RipeningOnce churned, pack the can down into fresh ice and salt for an hour or two, or move the ice to the freezer. It firms and the flavor rounds out; served immediately it tastes thin and slushy.
- YieldAbout 2½ quarts, which serves twelve to sixteen as a luncheon course.
Corn syrup arrived in American kitchens as an industrial product in search of domestic uses, and companies met that problem with recipe booklets — small collections like this one, printed cheaply and given away, in which every formula happened to call for the sponsor's syrup. Karo, introduced in the early twentieth century, was sold in graded labels distinguished by color and flavor rather than by the "light" and "dark" of today, and the booklets worked hard to show cooks that syrup was not merely something to pour on pancakes. A frozen ice is one of the more honest arguments they could make: corn syrup genuinely improves texture in frozen desserts. That the ice is filed under Luncheon reflects the period's menu structure, where a light fruit ice appeared between courses or closed a midday meal rather than serving as an evening dessert.