Orange Water Ice
This is from The Nu-Kooka, 2nd Edition, “Containing the Best Jewish and Continental Dishes, Cocktails, Savouries, Confectionery. Revised and Re-edited and including the latest American Recipes.” It cost 5 shillings and is and was published before 1948. The National Library of Australia has the first edition, which was forty pages shorter and published between 1934 and 1945 as well as the second - I only have the second. Everyone Jewish owned the Nu-Kooka in my childhood, and most of us had copies of the Settlement Cookbook as well. Everyone except my Aunt Gussie - one day I’ll tell you the story of her and cookbooks.
I always wondered about the name, but now I suspect that “Kooka” was the type of stove and I am sorely tempted to talk about a Kooka in the town of Burra being a Kookaburra, but that would be a bad joke even for me, so I’ll refrain. Instead I’ll give you a recipe for a water-ice, since I promised Elisa a sorbet and water-ices were an important variant of sorbets in icebox Australia.
Orange Water Ice
1 cup sugar
2 cups boiling water
2 cups fresh orange juice
1 tsp gelatine
4 tbs lemon juice
Add sugar to boiling water and stir. When sugar is dissolved, boil for 5 minutes. Soften gelatine in cold water. Add gelatine and strained fruit juices to syrup. Place tray in refrigerator and freeze. [The recipe says to stir constantly during the freezing, which in my mother’s interpretation meant taking the tray out of the freezer every 15-20 minutes and giving it a vigorous whip.) When nearly frozen, turn the ice out into a bowl and beat one more time. Return to tray and finish freezing.
Note: gelatine is not kosher. This doesn’t stop it being in many, many recipes that were popular in the Australian Jewish community before the 1960s. From the 1960s we gradually replaced the gelatine with agar-agar.
November 29th, 2006 at 3:21 pm
Ooo…that sounds tasty. Thanks!
November 30th, 2006 at 12:13 am
My pleasure :).
November 30th, 2006 at 6:31 pm
There actually now IS a kosher gelatin. I think it’s made with caragneenan, or however you spell it. It’s a seaweed derivative.
Thankfully, I’m not that picky.
December 1st, 2006 at 4:56 am
Technically it was round then, too, just not in suburban Melbourne. It makes a good jelly - I sometimes use it for jellies for vegetarians because the jelly made from carageenan seems to have a better wobble factor than agar agar.
I’m thinking back and the one thing we could get easily in the 60s and 70s that had carageenan as a major ingredient were German cake glazes. We used them on flans (butter cake bases, home made preserves or fresh fruit and then some apricot glaze).