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Tangerine Oranges, Frosted
Divide some tangerine oranges into quarters. Have ready some thin wooden skewers four or five inches long, a skewer for each piece of orange, and put them in the point of each quarter of orange about half-way through. Lay one end of the skewers upon a sieve so that the fruit can hang outside without touching anything, and let it dry for two or three hours. Make an icing by boiling a pound of sugar with a pint of water to a clear syrup, and when it is smooth and clear add a little of the juice and grated rind of the orange to flavour it agreeably. When the sugar rises like large beads in the pan, take a little quickly from the top with the finger, and plunge it at once into cold water. If it comes easily off the finger the sugar is ready for use, and must not be boiled longer, or it will be discoloured. Dip the pieces or oranges in the icing, and afterwards let them drain from the sieve until cold. Remove the skewers, and serve the iced fruit in a compote-dish. Time, about three hours. Sufficient, six oranges for a moderate-sized dish.
A dessert-course sweetmeat that stands or falls on two things: absolutely dry fruit and sugar taken to the right stage. Everything else is assembly.
- The hinge — dry fruit, hot syrupAny surface moisture on the segments will turn the coating cloudy and sticky rather than glassy. The two or three hours of hanging is not padding; the cut faces need to skin over before dipping.
- Read the sugar test as a temperatureRead the sugar test with care -- Syrup that "rises like large beads" and comes cleanly off the finger after a plunge into cold water is one of the older sugar-boiling tests; the book names no stage, and the description could cover anything from the bead stage upwards, so a sugar thermometer is worth using in place of the finger test — boiling sugar causes deep burns and sticks to skin.
- Imperial measuresA pound of sugar is about 2 1/4 cups; an imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so a shade under 2 1/2 US cups. That is a dilute syrup to begin with and will boil a good while before it reaches the stage the recipe describes.
- SkewersWooden cocktail sticks or bamboo skewers work; push them in only halfway so the segment holds without splitting the membrane. A segment with broken membrane will leak juice into the syrup and seize it.
- Flavouring the syrupThe recipe adds the juice and grated rind while the syrup is still 'smooth and clear', i.e. early rather than late; keep it to a teaspoon or so, since liquid added to a hot syrup will spit.
- Weather mattersBoiled-sugar coatings draw moisture from the air. On a humid day the coating goes tacky within an hour or two, so make these the day they are served, ideally within a few hours.
- Yield and servingSix tangerines quartered gives about 24 pieces, enough for six to eight at the end of a meal. Serve in a shallow glass or china dish, in a single layer; stacked pieces glue themselves together.
This is a sugar-boiling exercise rather than a pudding, and that is the point of it: "frosted" or iced fruit was a display piece for the dessert course, the last service of a Victorian dinner, where fresh and candied fruit, nuts and ices were set out together. Tangerines — mandarins generally said to be named for Tangier, from which early consignments were shipped to Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century — were a fashionable novelty in the decades when this dictionary was compiled. The technique is the ancestor of the modern toffee-dipped fruit and of the caramel-spun garnishes still used in pastry work; what has changed is chiefly the thermometer.