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Orange Float
One quart water, the juice and pulp of two lemons, one coffeecup sugar; when boiling, add four table-spoons corn starch, let boil fifteen minutes, stirring all the time; when cold pour it over four or five peeled and sliced oranges, and over the top spread the beaten whites of three eggs; sweeten and add a few drops of vanilla. - Mrs. Wm. Skinner.
A cornstarch-thickened lemon jelly poured over sliced oranges and topped with meringue. Two things in the original need rethinking: the acid, and the fifteen-minute boil.
- The hinge: acid and cornstarchLemon juice added at the start and then boiled for a quarter of an hour will break the starch down and leave you with a thin, weeping sauce. Cook the water, sugar and cornstarch together until thick and clear, take it off the heat, then stir in the lemon juice and pulp.
- Boil fifteen minutesCornstarch reaches full thickening within a minute or two of coming to a boil. Long cooking only risks scorching the bottom of the pan and thinning the set. Two minutes of steady bubbling, stirring throughout, is enough.
- A coffeecup of sugarTake it as one cup. Nineteenth-century coffeecups ran smaller than modern mugs but were treated as roughly a cup in American receipt books of the 1870s.
- Consistency to expectFour tablespoons of cornstarch to a quart of water gives a soft, pourable pudding rather than anything sliceable. That is correct for a float, which should settle around the orange slices.
- CoolingLay plastic wrap directly on the surface as it cools or it will form a rubbery skin that spoils the texture. Chill thoroughly before pouring over the fruit, or the oranges will go limp.
- The orangesPeel, remove as much white pith as you can, and slice crosswise. Navel or similar sweet eating oranges work; blood oranges look striking under a pale jelly.
- The meringue toppingThe whites are beaten with sugar and vanilla and spread on raw. If serving anyone who should avoid uncooked egg, use pasteurized whites, or brown the meringue briefly under a broiler.
- YieldAbout six to eight servings. A single glass bowl shows the layers to advantage.
A "float" in American cookery of this period meant a dessert with something buoyant on top -- a cooked cream or starch pudding crowned with beaten whites, close kin to the older floating island and to snow puddings. It appears in Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877), a book that reflects two things reaching the ordinary Midwestern kitchen: boxed corn starch, sold commercially from the middle of the century and promoted as a cheap, reliable thickener for puddings, and citrus, which railroads and improved steam shipping were beginning to make more widely and regularly available -- the first carloads of California oranges went east in the later 1870s. A dish named for oranges that takes its flavor from lemons is a little odd: the lemon does the sharpening, and the oranges are there to be seen.