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Orange Pudding
Take four fair-sized oranges, peel, seed, and cut in small pieces. Add one cup of sugar, and let it stand. Into one cup of nearly boiling milk stir two tabespoonfuls of corn starch, mixed with a little water and the yolks of three eggs. When done, let it cool, and mix with the orange. Make a frosting of the whites of the eggs and half a cup of sugar. Spread over the top of the pudding, and put it into the oven for a few moments to brown.
A simple cornstarch custard folded through macerated oranges under a soft meringue. The whole thing hinges on getting the starch fully cooked and then cooled before the fruit goes in.
- Cook the starch outTwo tablespoons cornstarch in one cup of milk gives a very thick paste; stir it constantly over gentle heat and let it bubble a full minute after it thickens. "When done" means the raw-starch taste is gone, which takes longer than the eye suggests.
- Temper the yolksThe original has you stir cornstarch slurry and yolks into nearly boiling milk together. Safer for texture: whisk the slurry into the hot milk first, then ladle a little of the hot mixture into the yolks before returning everything to the pan, or you will get threads of cooked egg.
- Cool before combiningFold the orange and sugar into the custard only once it is at room temperature or cooler. Warm custard plus juicy fruit thins the whole pudding, and acid from the oranges will slacken hot starch.
- Drain the fruitOranges left to stand with a cup of sugar throw off a great deal of juice. Drain most of it off before mixing or the pudding will not set; the syrup is worth keeping for another use.
- Peeling and seeding"Peel" here means removing the white pith as well, which is bitter. Supermarket navels are effectively seedless, so the seeding step usually disappears; if using Valencias or blood oranges, expect a few pips.
- The meringueThree whites to half a cup of sugar is a soft meringue. Beat to soft peaks, add the sugar gradually, and beat until glossy and no longer gritty between the fingers.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no temperature, only 'a few moments to brown'. In practice that means a hot oven, or a broiler watched constantly, for the short time it takes to colour the top. A browning this brief leaves the interior of the meringue barely set; baking at a moderate heat, around 325F for about 20 minutes, will cook the whites through instead.
- Vessel and yieldUse a shallow baking dish of about a quart so there is surface area for the meringue. Serves four to six, and it is best eaten the day it is made, before the fruit weeps.
Orange pudding of this kind belongs to a large family of late nineteenth-century American desserts built on cornstarch, which arrived as a cheap domestic thickener after mid-century and took its place alongside older custards set with eggs alone or with breadcrumbs and suet, which persisted well past 1900. Cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s are full of near-identical formulas under names like orange cream and orange trifle, all following the same pattern: a starch-thickened milk base, fresh fruit, and a meringue lid browned at the last moment. Fresh oranges were by then a reliable winter luxury in most of the country, moving north and east by rail from Florida and California, which is presumably why a dessert that would arguably have been extravagant in 1850 sits unremarked among the everyday puddings here. The meringue top also served a thrifty purpose, using the whites left over from a yolk-thickened custard so that nothing went to waste.