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Orange Pudding (Six large oranges cut in small)
Six large oranges cut in small pieces; add to this two cups sugar, then take one pint milk, two small tablespoonfuls corn starch, yolks of three eggs; after the milk commences to boil, add the eggs and corn starch, with a small pinch of salt, boil until a little thick in a farina kettle; when cool pour the mixture over the oranges and sugar. Beat the whites to a stiff froth, sweeten a little and place upon the pudding, put it in the oven just long enough to brown.
A cornstarch custard poured over sugared oranges and finished with meringue — essentially a Victorian orange trifle. Two details in the original need translation: the farina kettle and the vague oven direction.
- Farina kettleA double boiler. Set a heatproof bowl or an inner pan over simmering water and cook the custard there; the cornstarch and yolks will scorch or curdle over direct heat.
- Preparing the oranges"Cut in small pieces" is most easily read as peeled, pith and membrane removed, and cut into segments or dice over a bowl so the juice is kept. Pick out any seeds.
- SugarTwo cups over six oranges is very sweet by current taste, and the meringue is sweetened again. Half to two-thirds of a cup is enough to draw juice from the fruit, and the custard needs a couple of tablespoons of its own.
- The custardSlake the cornstarch in a little cold milk and beat it into the yolks before adding to the hot milk, or it will lump. "A little thick" means coating a spoon thickly — about 8 to 10 minutes in the double boiler. Cool it before it goes over the fruit, as the recipe specifies, or the juice thins it out.
- Browning the meringueThree whites beaten stiff with about three tablespoons of sugar. "Just long enough to brown" means a few minutes in a hot oven — around 400F if you want a modern figure — watched closely; the base is cold, so this is colouring the top, not cooking the pudding through.
- ServingServes six to eight. It is best eaten the day it is made — the meringue softens and the oranges release more juice overnight. Serve cool but not fridge-cold.
Orange puddings of this kind appear all through late nineteenth-century American household books, and they depend on two things that were new at the time: cheap cornstarch and cheap oranges. Cornstarch, commercially manufactured in the United States from the 1840s, gave home cooks a thickener that set a milk custard reliably with fewer eggs, and books of this period use it constantly in place of the older flour-and-yolk mixtures. Oranges, meanwhile, arrived in northern cities in quantity once Florida and California fruit could travel by rail, which is why a recipe calling for six large ones reads as an everyday dessert rather than a luxury. The layered structure — fruit at the bottom, custard poured over, meringue browned on top — is the same one behind English orange trifle, and the technique of returning a cold pudding to the oven purely to colour its meringue is a finish it shares with lemon pie and queen of puddings.