Home › Fancy Dishes › Oranges
Oranges
Slice and mix with powdered sugar; place on a dish and strew grated cocoanut over the top. Another pretty style of preparing oranges: quarter the skins, leaving the pulp whole, leaving the rind attached at the stem end, turning each piece into points. Form in a pyramid with bananas and white grapes.
Two ways of serving raw oranges rather than a cooked dish; the whole business is knife work and arrangement. A few of the period's assumptions need translating.
- Powdered sugarIn American books of this era "powdered sugar" usually means a fine granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Superfine (caster) sugar dissolves into the juice cleanly; confectioners' sugar will cloud it.
- Slice and mixPeel to the flesh, removing all white pith, then cut crosswise into rounds or cut out the segments free of membrane. Navels and other seedless varieties are the practical choice today; the recipe says nothing about seeds, and seeded oranges would have been common enough when it was written.
- Grated cocoanutMost likely fresh coconut grated on a box grater -- moist, sweet only from itself -- though prepared shredded coconut was also sold by this period. Packaged sweetened shredded coconut is much sweeter and drier; if you use it, cut the sugar on the fruit or leave it out. Unsweetened desiccated coconut is the closer match.
- Macerating timeSugar the oranges 20 to 30 minutes before serving so a light syrup forms, but no longer — citrus slices sitting for hours go limp and weep. Add the coconut at the table so it stays distinct.
- The quartered-skin trickScore the peel from the blossom end toward the stem into four sections, cutting through the rind only, then loosen each section from the fruit and leave it joined at the stem. Trim the free end of each strip to a point and curl it outward. The ball of pulp then sits in an open flower of rind.
- The pyramidBuild it on a footed compote or a shallow bowl, largest fruit at the base, bananas peeled and left whole or in halves, grapes in small clusters. Bananas brown fast, so assemble immediately before the dish goes to the table or brush the cut surfaces with lemon or orange juice.
- YieldNo quantity is given. Reckon one orange per person for the sliced version; a pyramid for a table of six wants six to eight oranges, three or four bananas and about a pound of grapes.
History: Fruit served whole and built into a pyramid belongs to the dessert course of the late-Victorian and Edwardian table, where the last thing brought in was as much an ornament as a food -- an inheritance from the older French *dessert* of fruit, nuts and sweetmeats arranged on tiered stands. That such a display could be made from oranges, bananas and grapes at all is worth noting: over the closing decades of the nineteenth century refrigerated shipping and rail brought Florida and California citrus, Central American and Caribbean bananas, and table grapes within reach of many households for much of the year, where a generation earlier an orange was more often a seasonal treat than an everyday fruit. Coconut came in on the same trade, and grated coconut turns up often in American cookbooks of the period, scattered over cakes, custards and, as here, cut fruit -- a "fancy dish" that asks for nothing but a sharp knife and the confidence to arrange.