Home › The Principles of Cookery › Orange, Iced
Orange, Iced
Take off the rind, and carefully remove as much of the white as possible without drawing the juice; if bruised, oranges are useless for this purpose. Whisk the whites of two eggs to a froth, and then beat into it a pound of sugar, which should be of the best quality, and pounded; continue to beat for a quarter of an hour, when the oranges must be dipped singly into the egg and sugar mixture; this is best effected by running a strong thread through each, by which they can be attached to a rod suspended across the oven. In a cool oven they should dry without acquiring colour, and will resemble balls of ice. Time, about half an hour to dry. Sufficient, half a pound of sugar to twelve oranges.
This is a confectioner's trick rather than a cooked dish: a whole peeled orange enclosed in a shell of dried royal icing so that it looks like a ball of ice. Everything depends on the fruit being sound and the surface dry before it is dipped.
- Choose the fruit firstThe instruction about bruising is the hinge of the recipe. Any soft spot or nicked membrane will weep juice, the icing will dissolve from underneath and the shell will slump. Use firm, thick-skinned oranges and take the pith off with a small sharp knife rather than your fingers, leaving the segment walls unbroken, then blot the surface dry.
- The two sugar quantities disagreeThe method says a pound of sugar to two egg whites, while the note at the end allows half a pound for twelve oranges. Both can be true if the first figure describes a working batch of icing and the second what actually adheres, but as written it is ambiguous. Mix about 8 oz sugar per egg white and add more until the icing coats the back of a spoon thickly without running.
- "Pounded" sugarThis means sugar crushed to a powder in a mortar, not granulated. Modern icing (confectioners') sugar is the equivalent, though it carries a little cornflour, which makes a slightly softer, more opaque shell. Sift it before beating.
- Fifteen minutes of beatingThat timing assumes a hand whisk. A stand mixer on medium will bring the same mixture to a smooth, glossy, thickly ribboning state in rather less time. Over-beating past that point whips in air and can give a dull, bubbled surface.
- A cool ovenHere the low, falling heat of a range after cooking, perhaps somewhere in the region of 175-200F, though the book gives no figure. A domestic oven at its lowest setting with the door propped ajar comes close, and a dehydrator at 130-140F is better still. Colour means the oven is too hot; the finished shell should be dead white.
- Half an hour is optimisticHalf an hour may be optimistic -- at a genuinely low temperature the icing may need considerably longer to set hard right through, and longer still in humid weather. Test by tapping: it should sound dry rather than yield.
- Suspending themThe thread and rod work well because nothing touches the wet icing. A cake rack set over a baking sheet will do, but the underside will flatten and may need a second dip once the first coat is firm.
- Raw egg whiteThe icing is never heated to a temperature that pasteurises it. Use pasteurised egg white, sold in cartons, or meringue powder made up according to its packet, which behaves much the same way here.
- Yield and keepingTwelve iced oranges, meant as a dessert-table centrepiece. Best made the day they are wanted: the shell draws moisture from the fruit and from the air, and is likely to be tacky and dulled by the second day.
"Iced" here has nothing to do with freezing; it is the older sense of the word, meaning coated with a hard white sugar glaze, the same sense preserved in iced cakes and iced buns. Victorian dessert services were as much display as food, and frosted or iced whole fruits, grapes rolled in egg white and caster sugar, iced oranges, sugared plums, sat among the flowers and glass on the dinner table for their appearance as much as their flavour. The requirement that the sugar be "of the best quality, and pounded" is a reminder that uniformly fine icing sugar was not yet something a cook could simply buy in a bag.