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Oranges, Pickled
Take half a dozen fine Seville oranges. Cut them deeply, rub them well with salt, and let them stand in a warm place for four or five days. Sprinkle a table-spoonful of coriander-seeds over them, and cover them with a pint and a half of boiling vinegar in which two blades of mace have been simmered for two minutes. Boil the vinegar once or twice, and pour it again upon the oranges, then cover the jar with bladder, and store for use. This pickle ought to be kept fully two months before it is used. It should be served with wild fowl. Time, six or eight minutes to prepare. Probable cost, 1s. 6d.
A bitter-orange pickle of the kind Victorian kitchens kept on the shelf to cut the richness of roast game. Nothing here is difficult, but several of the instructions assume equipment and produce that have moved on.
- Seville oranges are the pointSweet eating oranges will not do: Sevilles are sour, thick-skinned and bitter, which is what stands up to salt, vinegar and two months in a jar. They appear in shops for a few weeks in mid-winter, sold for marmalade, and freeze whole perfectly well if you want to pickle out of season.
- "Cut them deeply"The text does not say how, but it most likely means scoring through the peel into the flesh, several cuts around each fruit, so that the salt and later the vinegar can penetrate; the fruit appears to be left whole rather than sliced.
- The warm saltingFour or five days in a warm place draws out juice and softens the peel. A kitchen worktop out of direct sun is warm enough; the fruit should be turned in its own brine daily and any that goes soft or slimy discarded rather than pickled.
- Blades of maceMace is the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg, sold either as whole "blades" or ground. Two blades is somewhere in the region of a half to a whole teaspoon of ground mace, depending on the size of the blades, though the whole spice infuses more cleanly and can be strained out.
- The vinegarA pint and a half is 30 imperial fl oz, or about 850 ml. Use malt or cider vinegar at 5 per cent acidity; the fruit should be fully submerged, so top up with more hot vinegar if six large oranges swallow the lot.
- Boiling the vinegar againPouring off, reheating and re-pouring the vinegar, as the recipe directs ("once or twice"), is the old way of driving the pickle into the fruit without cooking it to mush. It also drives off some vinegar, another reason to keep a little in reserve.
- Bladder as a coverA pig's bladder was tied wet over the jar mouth and shrank tight as it dried. Use a glass jar with a plastic-lined or glass lid: bare metal lids corrode badly in vinegar fumes and will taint the pickle.
- StorageKeep the sealed jar somewhere cool and dark for the two months of maturing, and refrigerate once opened. Discard the lot if the vinegar clouds, the fruit floats above the liquid and moulds, or the jar smells yeasty rather than sharp.
- Time and costThe "six or eight minutes" counts only the hands-on work at the stove; the pickle needs four or five days' salting and two months' keeping. What 1s 6d represented to a given household is hard to judge, but it was not a trivial sum.
- ServingServe a quartered orange or a spoonful of the peel alongside duck, goose, venison or any dark, fatty roast, with a little of the vinegar spooned into the pan juices.
Pickled oranges belong to a long English habit of preserving sour fruit in spiced vinegar as a relish for meat, the same tradition that gives us pickled walnuts, pickled damsons and mushroom ketchup. Seville oranges arrive in Britain in January and February and were historically valued not as fruit to eat but as an acid ingredient, going into marmalade, into sauces for duck and into pickles like this one; the bitter orange's association with wild fowl is old enough that the pairing survives today in bigarade sauce. The recipe is the sort of thing a Victorian household expected to have on hand, a shelf of goods laid down in season and eaten out of it. The two-month wait, the bladder cover and the costing in shillings and pence all mark it as a recipe written for a kitchen that produced its own condiments rather than buying them by the jar.