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Orange, Seville, Paste for Dessert
Pare the yellow rind from some smooth-skinned Seville oranges, and be careful not to take with it the white thin skin which covers the fruit. Throw the rinds into boiling water, and let them keep boiling until they are quite tender, then place them upon an inverted sieve, and, as soon as the water has run from them, pound them in a mortar with as much powdered sugar as they will take. Roll the paste out to the thickness of a quarter of an inch, stamp it into shapes with an ordinary pastry-cutter, and put these upon buttered paper in a very slow oven. When they are dry on one side, turn them to the other. Put them in a tin box between sheets of writing-paper, and store in a warm place. Probable cost of Seville oranges, 1s. per dozen. Time, about two hours to boil the rind.
This is a sugar paste of candied bitter-orange rind, dried into lozenges rather than baked — closer to a fruit pastille than a pastry. The whole thing depends on getting the rind tender and the sugar dense enough to keep.
- The hinge: no pithThe instruction to leave the white skin behind is the one that decides whether the paste is fragrant or acrid. Take the coloured zest only, with a swivel peeler or a zester, and stop as soon as you see white.
- Seville oranges are seasonalThe bitter Seville (Citrus × aurantium) appears in shops for a few weeks in January and February, sold for marmalade. Outside that window, bitter orange peel is sometimes available frozen or dried; sweet orange zest will work but gives a much blander, less perfumed paste.
- Two hours of boilingThin-pared zest is often tender in 20 to 40 minutes. Change the water two or three times if you want to soften the bitterness, and taste a piece rather than trusting the clock.
- "As much sugar as they will take"In practice this is roughly equal weight of sugar to drained rind, sometimes a little more. Work it in gradually; the paste should be stiff enough to roll without sticking and should hold a cut edge. Under-sugared paste will not keep.
- Mortar or machineA food processor does the pounding in seconds, but pulse rather than run it — you want a paste, not a purée, and over-working releases water that thins the mixture.
- "A very slow oven"200-225F, or the lowest setting your oven has, with the door propped slightly to let moisture escape. A dehydrator at around 135F works better still. The pieces should dry, not colour; if they brown, the oven is too hot.
- Buttered paper and writing-paperUse baking parchment for both the drying tray and the layers in the storage tin; the writing-paper served simply to stop the pieces sticking.
- Storing in a warm placeThe point is dryness, not heat. A cool, very dry cupboard in an airtight tin is the modern equivalent; any residual moisture will make the lozenges weep and eventually mould.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities, so the yield depends on the number and size of the oranges and on your cutter. They are dessert sweetmeats, served a few to a person with coffee or after fruit.
Sugared and dried fruit pastes belong to a long confectionery tradition that predates the domestic cookbook — the Portuguese and Spanish marmelada of quince, the French pâte de fruits, the English dried "cakes" of orange and lemon that appear in seventeenth-century still-room books. Sugar was preservative as much as flavouring, and a stillroom that could turn out boxes of dried paste had a dessert course available in any month. Cassell's places this among its dessert confections at a moment when the Seville orange had a fixed place in the English calendar: shipped from Spain in midwinter, bought by the dozen or the box, and worked up within days into marmalade, wine, or sweetmeats like this one. The costing of a shilling a dozen dates the entry as much as anything in it — the book's habit of pricing ingredients was aimed at a household mistress budgeting a week's table, and it is the reason these volumes are still useful to anyone studying Victorian food economics.