Home › The Principles of Cookery › ORANGE CREAM SAUCE (for Puddings and sweet dishes)
ORANGE CREAM SAUCE (for Puddings and sweet dishes)
Soak the thin rind of half a small Seville orange in four table-spoonfuls of water for half an hour. Strain the liquid, add two ounces of loaf sugar and the juice of a St. Michael orange, and boil quickly for two minutes. When nearly cold, mix it with half a pint of thick cream and a table-spoonful of rum, and serve. Probable cost, 1s. 2d. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
A cold, uncooked pouring sauce built on an orange syrup let down with cream. The whole thing turns on temperature and on how the syrup meets the cream.
- The hinge: let the syrup coolAcid and warmth will both curdle cream, and here you have both. The syrup must be at or near room temperature before it goes near the cream, and it should be stirred into the cream gradually rather than the cream poured into it.
- Imperial measuresHalf a pint of British cream is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. Four tablespoonfuls of water is roughly ¼ cup; Victorian tablespoons ran a little larger than modern ones, but nothing here is fussy enough to matter.
- Seville orangeThe bitter marmalade orange, in season only in midwinter. Its rind carries the aromatic bitterness the sauce is after. Out of season, the pared zest of an ordinary orange plus a strip of grapefruit or lemon zest gets closer than orange alone.
- St. Michael orangeThe sweet oranges shipped from São Miguel in the Azores, a standard grocer's line in Victorian Britain. Any good sweet eating orange stands in; the point is that one orange supplies bitterness and rind, the other juice and sugar.
- Thin rindPare it with a peeler so you take colour and no white pith. Pith soaked for half an hour would push the sauce from pleasantly bitter to harsh.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar sold in cones and broken up as needed, prized for purity. Two ounces of ordinary granulated sugar, about ¼ cup, is the equivalent.
- Thick creamDouble cream, 48 per cent butterfat. US heavy cream at 36 per cent works but gives a thinner sauce; it can be whipped to soft peaks first and the syrup folded in if you want body.
- Yield and servingSix to eight as written, which is generous for a pouring sauce over a steamed or baked pudding. It will not hold long once mixed, so combine within an hour or two of serving and keep it cold.
Cassell's places this among the sweet sauces of the Victorian pudding repertoire, where cream, spirit and citrus were the standard three notes. The pairing of two different oranges is the telling detail: bitter Seville for aroma, sweet Azorean for juice. Both were imports, and the fact that a general household dictionary could name a specific origin like St. Michael suggests how familiar long-distance fruit shipping had become. The costing, 1s. 2d. for six to eight servings, was the book's characteristic service to the mistress budgeting a dinner. Rum rather than brandy is a slightly homelier choice, and belongs to the same tradition that put spirits into hard sauce and mince pies.