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Florentine Ice Cream
MAKE a custard of the yolks of 6 eggs, the rind of 1 orange, and 3/4 pint of boiling syrup, made of sugar and water. Beat with an eggbeater, but do not let it boil. Add 3/4 pint of cream, mix well, and strain. Freeze it for 2 hours, and turn out of the mould on a dish.
A plain custard-base ice cream, orange-scented, from a period when "freeze it" meant packing a mould in ice and salt. The instructions assume knowledge the modern cook has to supply.
- The hinge: do not let it boilPour the hot syrup onto the yolks in a thin stream while beating, then cook gently, stirring, until the custard coats a spoon — around 170-175F. Above about 180F the yolks scramble and no amount of straining will rescue the texture.
- Pints and gillsThis is an American book of 1902, so 3/4 pint is 1 1/2 cups. Yolks of 6 eggs to 1 1/2 cups syrup and 1 1/2 cups cream is a rich, low-volume base.
- The syrup is unspecified"Boiling syrup, made of sugar and water" gives no ratio. A syrup of roughly equal parts sugar and water is a reasonable reading, and puts the sweetness in the normal range for a custard ice. Treat it as a judgement call and taste the base before freezing, since cold mutes sweetness noticeably.
- The orange rindPare the rind in strips with no white pith and steep it in the hot syrup, or infuse it in the cream, then remove it at the straining step, which is presumably what the strain is for. Grated zest left in the base can give a slightly bitter or gritty finish.
- Strain, then chillStraining catches the rind and any threads of set yolk. Chill the base thoroughly — several hours or overnight — before it goes into the machine; a warm base churns into coarse crystals.
- "Freeze it for 2 hours"This means a hand-cranked pail packed with cracked ice and coarse salt, or the base sealed in a mould and buried in the same mixture. A modern churn takes 20-30 minutes, after which the ice wants two or three hours in the freezer to firm.
- Turning out of the mouldDip the mould in warm water for a few seconds, wipe it, and invert onto a chilled dish. If you have no mould, pack the churned ice into a loaf tin lined with plastic and unmould the same way.
- YieldAbout a quart, six to eight small servings.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea (1902) collected dishes its author framed as souvenirs of foreign kitchens, and the "Florentine" label here signals Italy rather than any documented Florentine original — this is a standard egg-custard ice given a place name and a citrus perfume. The attribution is not arbitrary: Italy is generally credited with carrying frozen desserts into the rest of Europe, and the tale that Catherine de' Medici brought ices to France with her in 1533 is traditional rather than documented. What dates the recipe most precisely is the freezing instruction. Two hours in a mould belongs to the ice-and-salt era, when a household bought ice by the block, cracked it, layered it with rock salt around a pewter mould or a crank pail, and reckoned time in hours rather than minutes. The heavy proportion of yolks does double duty here, flavouring the ice and giving it enough body to survive that slow, unstirred freeze without turning to a block of crystals.