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Orange Pudding (Take five oranges remove)
Take five oranges, remove the peels, and cut into the thinest possible slices. Place in a glass dish and scatter over them two tablespoons white sugar. Make a custard of one pint milk, one tablespoon of corn starch, rub fine with cold milk, and then stir in the boiling milk, and the yolks of three eggs, add one third teacup sugar. When cold pour it over the oranges. Beat the whites of three eggs, and one-third cup pulverized sugar, to a froth, and pour over it. If preferred it can be made in an earthen dish, and the whites browned slightly in the oven.
A cold cornstarch custard poured over sliced oranges and topped with meringue — what late nineteenth-century cookbooks often called an orange float. The measurements are loose but the method is sound.
- TeacupA teacup in this period is variously reckoned at anywhere from 4 to 6 fl oz, so one-third teacup is roughly 3 to 4 tablespoons. The custard is not meant to be very sweet; the sugar on the fruit and in the meringue carries much of it.
- Pulverized sugarThis is what we now sell as confectioners' or powdered sugar, though period versions were not always cut with cornstarch. Superfine (caster) sugar dissolves into the whites just as well and gives a cleaner meringue.
- Slicing the orangesRemove the peel and all the white pith with a knife rather than by hand, then slice crosswise as thinly as you can manage. Any membrane left on turns tough and stringy under the custard.
- The hinge: temper the yolksSlurry the cornstarch with cold milk, stir it into the scalded milk, then whisk a ladleful of the hot mixture into the beaten yolks before returning everything to the pan. Adding yolks straight to boiling milk, as the wording implies, will scramble them.
- Cook the starch outOnce thickened, keep the custard at a bare simmer for a minute or two, stirring. Cornstarch that has not been cooked through tastes chalky and will thin again as it stands.
- Cool before pouring"When cold" matters — hot custard poached over the fruit will draw juice out of the oranges and thin the whole dish. Cover the surface with plastic wrap while it cools to keep a skin from forming.
- Browning the meringueIf you take the oven option, use an ovenproof dish and 350F for 10-12 minutes, or 425F for 4-5 if you want colour without warming the custard through. A brief browning does not fully cook the whites; if raw or lightly cooked egg white is a concern in your household, use pasteurized whites.
- YieldAbout four to six servings. Assemble no more than a few hours ahead — meringue on a cold custard begins to weep by the next day.
Orange puddings and "orange floats" turn up frequently in American community cookbooks of the 1870s through the 1900s. Refrigerated rail transport and the Florida and California groves were bringing fresh oranges within easier reach of northern kitchens, while commercially milled cornstarch — produced in the United States from the middle of the nineteenth century — gave home cooks a cheap, reliable thickener that used fewer eggs than a true boiled custard. The result is a trifle in miniature: fruit, a poured custard, and a meringue lid, here assembled in a glass dish. The alternative given, browning the whites in an earthen dish, is closer to a baked pudding.