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WATER, ORANGE (for flavouring)
Take the thin rind of oranges, without any of the white part; bruise it in a mortar, and pour as much boiling water upon it as will barely cover it. Cover closely. When cold, strain the liquor, and bottle for use.
A simple cold infusion of orange zest, intended as a bottled flavouring to keep beside the vanilla and rose water. The whole point is capturing the volatile oil in the peel, which means covering the vessel the moment the water goes in.
- The hinge: keep it coveredThe aroma sits in volatile oils that leave with the steam. Cover the bowl or jar as soon as the boiling water is on and leave it sealed until fully cold — an uncovered infusion loses most of what you were after.
- Zest only, no pith"Without any of the white part" is not fussiness. Pith and the inner layer of peel are bitter and the bitterness extracts readily in hot water. A microplane or a sharp swivel peeler held almost flat gives you the coloured layer alone.
- Bruising without a mortarThe mortar ruptures the oil cells. Chopping the zest and then working it with the back of a spoon, or pounding it briefly with a little of the sugar you intend to use elsewhere, does the same job.
- ProportionsThe recipe gives no measure because it depends on how coarsely you pared: use only enough boiling water to barely cover the bruised rind, and you will bottle roughly that much liquid.
- Modern fruitSupermarket oranges are usually waxed and often treated with fungicide, all of which sits on the surface you are about to extract. Buy unwaxed fruit, or scrub in warm water and dry before paring.
- Keeping itThis is water and fruit with nothing to preserve it — no sugar, no spirit, no acid. Unlike a commercial extract it will not sit in a cupboard. Refrigerate in a clean bottle and use within about a week, or freeze in ice-cube trays.
- Not orange flower waterOlder recipes calling for "orange flower water" mean a distillate of the blossom, a quite different and more perfumed thing. This zest infusion substitutes only loosely; it tastes of peel, not of flowers.
Victorian kitchens needed liquid flavourings because they had few reliable bought ones: alcoholic essences were expensive and widely suspected of adulteration, a general concern of the period. Making your own from fruit you already had was cheaper and, more to the point, known to be genuine. The assumption was that a well-run larder held a small rank of such bottles for puddings, custards, icings and cakes, alongside vanilla, almond and rose waters. The cold-infusion method here is the humblest of the period approaches to citrus flavour — others being to rub a sugar lump over the whole fruit until it was saturated with oil, or to steep the peel in brandy or spirit, which produced something that actually kept.