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Orange Cream
Dissolve an ounce of isinglass in a pint of water. Add the strained juice of six sweet oranges and one lemon, and four ounces of loaf sugar, which has been well rubbed upon the rinds of the fruit. Stir all gently over the fire, until the sugar is dissolved, turn it out, and when nearly cold add half a pint of thick cream. Pour the mixture into a damp mould, and place it in a cool airy situation until it is stiff and firm. Serve the cream in a glass dish. Time, ten minutes to boil the juice and sugar with the isinglass. Probable cost, 2s. 10d. Sufficient for a quart mould.
ORANGE CREAM (another way). (See CREAM, ORANGE.)
A Victorian moulded cream, set with isinglass and flavoured chiefly through the sugar rather than the juice. Two things decide whether it works: how much gelling agent you use, and how warm the mixture is when the cream goes in.
- Rub the sugar on the rindsThis is the step that carries the flavour. Dragging lump sugar across the zest of the oranges and lemon strips out the peel oils, which are where orange character actually lives; the juice alone tastes thin and faintly stewed once heated. Zest finely and rub the zest into the sugar with your fingers if you have no sugar loaf to work with.
- Isinglass to gelatineIsinglass is dried fish swim bladder, sold in leaf or shred. Conversions to modern refined gelatine are unreliable: an ounce here is commonly reckoned to do the work of something like a quarter of that in powdered gelatine or platinum leaf, but strengths varied enough that the figure is genuinely approximate. Follow the ratio on your packet for the roughly quart of total liquid this makes -- a pint of water, the juice, and half a pint of cream -- and expect a soft, spoonable set rather than a rubbery one.
- Loaf sugarHard cone or lump sugar, refined and dry, which is why it could be scraped over fruit rind. Four ounces is a generous half cup of granulated sugar, which is modest for a pint of water plus citrus juice; taste before moulding.
- Six oranges and a lemonOranges of the period are often said to have run smaller and sharper than modern navels, though this is hard to pin down. Six will give roughly a cup and a half of juice today; strain it properly, since pulp clouds the set and settles as a layer at the bottom of the mould.
- "Nearly cold" before the creamHot acidic juice will curdle cream on contact, and warm liquid will thin it. Cool the gelatine base to just barely warm, then stir the cream in steadily. If the base has begun to set at the edges, warm it gently until fluid again before adding.
- Ten minutes to boilDo not actually boil it. The instruction means bring it to a bare simmer only long enough to dissolve the sugar and gelling agent; sustained boiling weakens gelatine and drives off the volatile oils you worked to capture.
- "A cool airy situation"The Victorian larder. Refrigerate instead, four to six hours or overnight for a quart mould.
- Damp mould and turning outRinsing the mould with cold water and leaving it wet lets the cream release cleanly. Dip the filled mould in warm water for a few seconds, no longer, before inverting onto the glass dish.
- YieldA quart mould serves six to eight as a light dessert.
Isinglass, a collagen extracted from the swim bladders of sturgeon and other fish, was the standard setting agent of the English kitchen long before packaged gelatine became cheap and reliable, and it also served the brewer as a fining for beer. Moulded creams and jellies of this kind were a fixture of the Victorian dinner table, and they were demanding work: they required a cool larder, a good copper mould and a cook who understood how much setting agent a given liquid needed. Cassell's, published in parts from the 1870s, prints costs alongside its recipes -- 2s 10d here -- as a reminder that a dish of oranges and cream in an English winter was an expense to be reckoned with. The cross-reference at the end, sending readers to CREAM, ORANGE, is characteristic of the dictionary format, which scattered variants across alphabetical entries rather than grouping them.