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Orange Sauce for Sweet Puddings
Rub three or four large lumps of sugar upon the rind of a large sweet orange until all the yellow part is taken off. Scrape out the pulp and juice of two oranges, and add them to the flavoured sugar. Mix a tea-spoonful of arrowroot very smoothly with three table-spoonfuls of maraschino or Curacoa. Stir all gently over the fire for three or four minutes until the sauce thickens, then serve immediately. Probable cost, exclusive of the liqueur, 2d. Sufficient for three persons.
A small, sharp orange sauce for steamed and baked puddings, thickened with arrowroot rather than flour so it stays clear. It comes together in minutes and depends almost entirely on how you treat the arrowroot.
- Do not let it boilArrowroot thickens at a fairly low temperature, well below boiling, and begins to break down if held at a rolling boil, turning the sauce thin and slippery. Stir over gentle heat only until it clears and coats the spoon, then take it off at once.
- Lump sugarVictorian loaf sugar was cut into hard lumps roughly the size of a modern sugar cube but often larger; three or four large lumps is somewhere around one to two tablespoons. Any hard cube works, and the rubbing is the point, not the shape.
- The rubbing methodDragging sugar across the zest strips out the peel oil and makes what is now called oleo-saccharum. It gives a rounder orange flavour than grated zest and is worth the two minutes; a Microplane and a pinch of sugar rubbed together is the shortcut, though slightly less aromatic.
- "Scrape out the pulp"Halve the oranges and work the flesh out with a spoon, leaving the white pith and membrane behind. Pith is bitter and will not soften in three minutes of cooking.
- The liqueursMaraschino here means the dry, clear Italian cherry liqueur, not the syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. Curacoa is the old spelling of curacao, an orange-peel liqueur; triple sec or Grand Marnier stands in. Three tablespoons in a sauce for three is noticeable but not raw, since little alcohol cooks off in so short a time.
- Volume and consistencyTwo oranges will give roughly three-quarters of a cup of pulp and juice, which with the liqueur makes something close to a cup. That is a thin pouring sauce, correctly so; if it seizes up, loosen with a spoonful of orange juice off the heat.
- YieldSufficient for three, as stated, meaning three or four tablespoons each over a sponge, castle or plum pudding. It does not reheat well and should be made while the pudding is turning out.
Cassell's places this among the sweet sauces meant to be ladled over steamed and baked puddings, a common close to a Victorian dinner. The two liqueurs named were both familiar confectioner's flavourings of the period: maraschino, distilled from marasca cherries and long associated with Zadar on the Dalmatian coast, and curacao, made from the dried peel of bitter oranges of the kind grown on the Caribbean island of the same name, though much of the liqueur was compounded in Europe from imported peel. Rubbing sugar on citrus rind to capture the peel oil is an older technique still, appearing in English cookery books before the nineteenth century and used whenever a cook wanted orange flavour without the water that juice brings. The note of cost, twopence excluding the liqueur, is characteristic of Cassell's, which gives a probable cost for dish after dish so a household could budget; the exclusion is telling, since the spirits would have cost many times the fruit.