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ORANGE PUDDING (another way)
Boil the thin yellow rinds of two Seville oranges and one sweet one until they are quite soft. Drain them well, and pound them to a paste. Beat a quarter of a pound of fresh butter to a cream, add a quarter of a pound of powdered sugar, the orange paste, the strained juice of the sweet orange, and a table-spoonful of brandy. Whisk four eggs thoroughly, and stir them in with the rest. Line a shallow dish with good puff-paste, pour in the mixture, and bake in a moderate oven for half an hour. Probable cost, 1s. 2d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A butter-and-egg curd baked in a puff-paste shell — closer to an orange tart than to a steamed pudding. The whole character of it rests on the peel, so treat that step as the recipe's hinge.
- Pare the rind, not the pith"Thin yellow rinds" means only the coloured zest, taken off with a vegetable peeler or sharp knife. Any white pith carried into the pounding will make the finished pudding bitter in the wrong, muddy way.
- Boiling the peel softExpect 45 minutes to an hour of simmering, changing the water once or twice, until a strip crushes easily between finger and thumb. Undercooked peel will not pound to a paste and leaves gritty threads through the custard; a food processor does the pounding in seconds.
- Seville orangesThese are the bitter marmalade oranges, in British shops only for a few weeks in January and February. Out of season, use the zest of one ordinary orange plus one lemon and one lime to approximate the sharpness, and keep the sweet orange's juice as written.
- Quarter of a pound115 g each of butter and sugar — one US stick of butter, and about half a cup of caster or superfine sugar. "Powdered sugar" in Victorian usage means finely ground granulated, not modern icing sugar with its cornflour.
- Moderate ovenConventionally taken as around 350F (175C). Half an hour is about right for an 8- to 9-inch shallow tin; the filling should be set at the edges with a slight wobble at the centre, and it firms further as it cools.
- The pastry basePuff paste under a wet filling goes soggy unless it starts hot. Line the tin, chill it well, and blind-bake 10-12 minutes before pouring in the mixture.
- Whisked eggsFour eggs whisked "thoroughly" and stirred in cold will curdle creamed butter. Add them a little at a time and beat well between additions, or warm them slightly first.
- YieldFour or five small servings as the book says, which by modern portioning is six from a 9-inch tart. Good just warm rather than hot.
Cassell's gives several orange puddings, and this one belongs to a long English line of baked citrus curds that runs back to the seventeenth-century "orange pudding" of manuscript receipt books — butter, sugar, eggs and boiled bitter peel, in a paste case, a family of ideas not far from later lemon curd. The Seville orange was the orange of the English kitchen for centuries: too sour to eat out of hand, it arrived by sea in midwinter and was used for marmalade, for sauces to duck and goose, and for puddings like this, with a sweet orange added for juice and mildness. The costing of 1s. 2d. is characteristic of the Dictionary, which gives a "probable cost" for most of its dishes; on that reckoning imported oranges, brandy and half a pound of butter and sugar together look like a modest rather than extravagant outlay in a Victorian middle-class kitchen.