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Orange Salad
Peel three or four good oranges, free them from the white skin, and cut them into slices of about a quarter of an inch in thickness. Arrange them neatly in a compote-dish, strew three ounces of finely-powdered sugar over them, and pour upon them a wine-glassful of sherry, a wine-glassful of brandy, and another of rum or whisky. Curacoa or maraschino may be used instead of the above mixture, if preferred. Many persons find no wine so agreeable in an orange salad as port. This dish should, if possible, be made the day before it is wanted.
A macerated orange dessert of the sort that closed a Victorian dinner. Nothing is cooked, so the whole dish depends on how the oranges are cut and how long they sit.
- Wine-glassfulIn late Victorian cookery books a wine-glass is reckoned at about 2 fl oz (60 ml). Three of them means roughly 6 fl oz of spirits and fortified wine over three or four oranges, which is a strongly alcoholic dish; halving it gives a syrup that still tastes of the fruit.
- Three ounces of sugarAbout 6 tablespoons of caster or superfine sugar, which is very sweet by modern palates. With supermarket navels, 1 to 2 tablespoons is usually enough.
- Free them from the white skinThis is the hinge. Cut the top and bottom off each orange, stand it up and slice the peel and all the pith away in strips following the curve, then slice across into rounds. Any pith left behind turns bitter as the fruit macerates.
- Compote-dishA shallow footed glass or china bowl. Any wide shallow dish works, but it should be non-reactive: the citrus acid will pick up a metallic taste from aluminium or bare cast iron.
- Curacoa and maraschinoCuraçao is the orange liqueur, now most often sold as triple sec or Grand Marnier; maraschino here is the dry Italian cherry liqueur, not the syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries.
- Made the day beforeOvernight maceration draws juice from the fruit and dissolves the sugar into a syrup. Cover and refrigerate; the slices soften as they sit, and will eventually go limp.
- YieldThree or four oranges serve four as a light dessert. Because of the spirits it is not a dish for children, and it is worth saying so at the table since it looks like plain fruit.
Orange salad belongs to the long English habit of ending a heavy dinner with something sharp and cold, and it is among the simplest of the compotes: no cooking, no custard, just fruit and a spirit syrup. Bitter and sweet oranges reached Britain in quantity from Spain, Portugal and the Mediterranean through the winter months, so the dish was a seasonal one, at its best in exactly the weeks when a rich Christmas table needed relieving. The three-spirit mixture here is characteristic of a period when sherry, brandy and rum all sat in the sideboard as a matter of course. A savoury cousin, orange slices dressed without sugar, is found in nineteenth-century books as an accompaniment to roast duck or wildfowl, and the two versions shade into one another.