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Seville Orange Cakes
Divide the oranges in halves, and take out the pips, of which there are a good many small ones. Scrape the pulp and juice into a bowl, and boil the rinds until they are so tender that a fork will pierce them easily. Dry them, and weigh them, and allow two pounds of powdered sugar to one pound of orange-rinds. Pound them to paste in a mortar, and add, very gradually, the juice, the pulp, and the powdered sugar. Mix all together, and when the preparation is thick and yellow, drop it upon tins, and dry the cakes in a cool oven. Time, about two hours to boil the rind. Probable cost, Seville oranges, 1s. per dozen when plentiful.
These are sweetmeats rather than cakes in the modern sense: boiled bitter-orange peel pounded with sugar, dropped in small rounds and dried until firm. The whole thing hinges on the weighing step, which happens after the rind is cooked.
- Weigh the rind wetWeigh the rind after boiling -- The two-to-one sugar ratio applies to the boiled, drained rind, not the raw fruit. The recipe says to dry the rinds before weighing, so pat them dry, weigh what you actually have, and take twice that weight in sugar; yields from a dozen oranges vary a good deal.
- "Powdered sugar" is not icing sugarIn British cookery of this period powdered sugar means granulated sugar ground fine, with no anti-caking starch. Modern caster sugar is the closest match; confectioners' sugar with cornflour will dull the flavour and set the paste chalky.
- Seville oranges are a six-week fruitSeville oranges have a short season -- They generally appear in January and February and are largely gone by March, though the dates shift from year to year. If you cannot get them, ordinary oranges plus the zest and juice of two lemons approximates the sharpness, though not the aromatic bitterness.
- A cool ovenBetween 200F and 225F, or the lowest setting your oven holds, with the door propped slightly to let moisture escape. A dehydrator at 135F works better and needs no watching, though it will take most of a day.
- Boiling the rindTwo hours is right for Sevilles, whose pith is thick and stubbornly bitter. Change the water once or twice during the boil if you want less bitterness; keep the same water throughout if you want the full marmalade edge.
- PoundingA food processor does in two minutes what the mortar does in twenty, but pulse rather than run it, and add the sugar in stages as the original directs. Dumping it all in at once makes a slack syrupy mass that will not hold a mound on the tray.
- How dry is dryThe cakes are done when the surface is no longer tacky and they lift cleanly from the tin, with a slight give in the centre. They will firm further as they cool.
- Yield and keepingA dozen oranges makes a good number of small cakes, depending on how large you drop them. Layer them between waxed paper in a tin; in a dry place they keep for months, and a light dusting of sugar stops them sticking to one another.
Sweetmeats of this kind sit at the older end of British confectionery, descending from the sugar pastes and "marchpanes" that preceded jam-making as the standard way to keep fruit through the year: pound the fruit with sugar, dry it hard, and the sugar does the preserving. The Seville orange has been imported into Britain for centuries as a cooking rather than eating fruit, valued precisely for the bitterness that makes it useless out of hand, and by the nineteenth century its brief winter season was fixed in the domestic calendar as marmalade time. Cassell's includes a price note, a shilling a dozen when plentiful, as it does for every entry in the book. The mortar work is the tell of the period, in the decades before mechanical mincers and mixers made such recipes casual.