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Orange Cakes
Peel some Seville oranges. Weigh the rinds, and boil them in two or three waters until they can be easily pierced with a fork. Drain the water from them, and pound them in a mortar with double their weight in powdered sugar, and the pulp and juice of the oranges, which must have been carefully freed from skin and seeds. Beat the mixture thoroughly; if it is too thick add more orange-juice. Let it stand a few hours, drop it upon buttered tins in small rounds, and dry these in a cool oven. Orange cakes should be kept in layers between sheets of writing-paper, and stored in a cool dry place. Time, two hours to boil the orange rinds. Probable cost, Seville oranges, 1d. or 1 1/2d. each.
This is a dried fruit confection rather than a cake in the modern sense — closer to a stiff orange paste dropped and dried to a chewy lozenge. Almost everything hinges on getting the bitterness out of the peel before the sugar goes in.
- The two or three waters are not optionalSeville peel is aggressively bitter, and the point of boiling and draining repeatedly is to leach out that bitterness. Skipping a change of water leaves the finished cakes harsh; taste a scrap of rind before you stop, it should be tender and only mildly bitter.
- Seville orangesThese are the sour bitter oranges of marmalade, in season for a few weeks in winter and sold at very few shops. Sweet oranges will work but give a much blander sweet, so lift them with a little lemon juice and zest.
- Sugar by weight, not volume"double their weight in powdered sugar" means twice the weight of the rinds, which the recipe has you weigh at the start, before boiling. Powdered sugar here is finely ground white sugar, not modern icing sugar with its cornflour; caster sugar is the closest match.
- Mortar or machineA food processor does in two minutes what the mortar does in twenty, but pulse rather than run it, and stop while a little texture remains. Fully liquidised peel gives a paste that never firms up properly.
- A cool ovenThe book gives no temperature; take it as the lowest setting your oven will hold, with the door propped slightly ajar. The aim is dehydration, not baking; the rounds should set dry to the touch on the surface and stay chewy inside.
- Buttered tins and writing-paperBaking parchment replaces both — line the sheet with it rather than buttering, and interleave the stored cakes with parchment squares instead of writing-paper. An airtight tin in a cool cupboard keeps them for a month or so.
- The resting periodLetting the beaten mixture stand a few hours lets the sugar dissolve fully into the juice and the paste stiffen so it holds a domed shape when dropped. Piping while it is still slack gives flat spreading discs.
Sweetmeats of this kind — fruit pounded with its own weight or more in sugar, then dried slowly — descend from the still-room confectionery of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, where they sat alongside quince paste, marmalades and candied peel as ways of carrying fruit through the year before refrigeration. Sugar in that quantity is a preservative as much as a flavouring. The Seville orange was known in England as a bitter fruit before sweet oranges became common, and its brief winter season made it a seasonal occupation in the kitchen; the recipe notes that the fruit cost a penny or three-halfpence each. The instruction to store the cakes between sheets of writing-paper is a period detail: writing paper was one of the barrier materials available in the domestic kitchen before greaseproof papers became common.