Home › The Principles of Cookery › Orangeade
Orangeade
Make a syrup by boiling six ounces of loaf sugar in half a pint of water until the sugar is dissolved. Pour it over the thin yellow rinds of two small oranges, and let them infuse for two or three hours. Strain the juice of six oranges into a glass jug. Add the flavoured syrup, first passing it through a jelly-bag, and a pint and a half of cold water. Let it get cold. A glassful of calf's foot stock is an improvement. Time, two or three hours to infuse the rinds. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for two pints and a half.
A Victorian still lemonade in orange form: a zest-infused syrup, fresh juice and water. The measures are imperial, and one ingredient belongs to the sickroom rather than the drinks trolley.
- Imperial measuresCassell's pint is 20 fl oz, so half a pint of water is 10 fl oz (about 1¼ US cups) and a pint and a half is 30 fl oz (about 3¾ US cups). The finished 2½ pints is roughly 50 fl oz, or a shade under 1.5 litres.
- Loaf sugarSugar sold in cones or hard blocks, broken and crushed before use. It was refined white sugar; six ounces of ordinary granulated (about 170 g, a generous ¾ cup) behaves much the same once dissolved.
- Rind, not pith"Thin yellow rinds" means the coloured zest pared off with a knife or peeler, no white attached. Pith infused in hot syrup turns the drink bitter within the two or three hours specified.
- Pour the syrup hotThe syrup should go over the rinds straight off the heat and be left covered to cool as it steeps. That heat is what draws the oils out; cold syrup poured on zest extracts very little in three hours.
- The jelly-bagA conical flannel or close-woven cloth bag used for straining without pressure. A double layer of muslin in a sieve does the same job. Its purpose here is clarity, not flavour, so a coffee filter is an acceptable substitute if you want the drink bright.
- Calf's foot stockThe gelatinous, very mildly flavoured jelly rendered by long-boiling calf's feet, kept in Victorian kitchens as a nourishing base for invalid drinks. Its main contribution is body rather than flavour. It is not something you can buy ready-made now; omit it, and the orangeade is little changed.
- Sugar levelSix ounces of sugar to six oranges and about 50 fl oz of finished liquid. Taste before chilling and add syrup rather than dry sugar if you want it sweeter.
- Keeping and servingMade with raw juice and no preservative, it should be refrigerated and drunk within about two days; the fresh orange flavour fades faster than that. Two and a half pints fills six to eight tumblers over ice.
The -ade ending reached English from French in the seventeenth century, arriving with words such as lemonade for a sweetened drink built on pressed fruit, and by the time Cassell's was compiled orangeade and lemonade of this "still" type were standard domestic accomplishments, made at home from syrup and fresh juice long before bottled aerated versions took over. The odd note here is the calf's foot stock. Calf's foot jelly was one of the great Victorian invalid foods, prized as easily digestible nourishment for the convalescent, and cookery books of the period suggested combining it with wine and other invalid drinks to make them "strengthening." Its appearance in a recipe otherwise aimed at hot weather is a reminder that a good deal of a nineteenth-century cook's drink repertoire was written with the sickroom in mind, and that the line between a refreshment and a remedy was drawn much less firmly than it is now.