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Seville Orange Cardinal
A few days before the cardinal is wanted peel three bitter oranges, slice them very thin, and pour a bottle of wine over them; then strain the preparation through a tamis, and add to the juice two bottles of wine and two or three pounds of sugar: keep stirring all the time till the sugar is completely melted.
A cold steeped wine punch rather than anything cooked, and the whole of it depends on how long the bitter peel sits in the wine. The proportions are late-Victorian and very sweet by current taste.
- What a "bottle" meansThree bottles is about 2.25 litres, or roughly half an imperial gallon. The recipe gives no wine type; a cardinal was often built on a dry white — Rhine or Moselle wine — and a crisp, unoaked white still suits it.
- The sugarTwo to three pounds of sugar to three bottles works out at roughly 400-600 g per litre, which is closer to a cordial than a punch. Start at a quarter of that and taste, adding more only if the bitter oranges demand it.
- Seville orangesThese are the bitter marmalade oranges, in the shops only from roughly late December through February. Out of season, use the zest of two ordinary oranges plus one lemon and one lime, which gets you nearer the sharp aromatic edge than sweet oranges alone.
- Peel, then sliceThe wording is ambiguous, but "slice them very thin" most likely means the peel rather than the whole fruit — it is the oil in the zest that flavours the wine. Pare away as much white pith as you can; pith steeped for days turns the drink harshly bitter rather than fragrant.
- TamisA tamis is a drum sieve of fine woven cloth. A muslin-lined strainer or a jelly bag does the same job. Let it drip rather than pressing, or the finished cardinal goes cloudy.
- "A few days"Two to three days in a covered jar in a cool place is ample for the first bottle of wine to take up the oil. Longer than about four days and the peel starts giving up bitterness with nothing gained in aroma.
- Dissolving the sugarCold wine takes sugar slowly. Stir it into a small quantity of the strained infusion first, or make a plain syrup and let it cool before combining, rather than standing over the whole three bottles with a spoon.
- Yield and servingAbout three litres, or twenty-odd glasses. Serve cold from a bowl or jug; it keeps a week or so refrigerated in stoppered bottles, and the flavour settles after the first day.
Cardinal belongs to a small family of Continental wine cups named for ecclesiastical rank and, by extension, for colour and richness: bishop was the red-wine drink, made with a clove-studded roasted orange, while cardinal is often said to be distinguished from it by being built on white wine with bitter orange — though several English sources make it with claret instead — and pope — the grandest — on champagne or Tokay. The distinctions were never rigidly kept and English cookery books of the period tend to blur them. The drinks came into British use largely from Germany, where Kardinal was a familiar bowl at student and club gatherings. The reliance on Seville oranges is telling: bitter oranges arrived in quantity each winter for marmalade-making, and a cook with a glut of them found other uses before the short season closed.