Home › Simple Cocoanut Desserts › Orange Sauce
Orange Sauce
1 tablespoon lemon or fruit juice fruit juice 1 tablespoon lemon or gelatine 1 tablespoon cold water 1 egg white, beaten 1 cup boiling water 3 tablespoons Dromedary 3 tablespoons sugar Cocoanut Few drops red color Soak gelatine in cold water, add boiling water and stir until gelatine is dissolved. Add sugar and lemon juice, strain and set aside until cool. Whisk with egg beater until frothy, add egg-white and color. Fold in cocoanut and beat until it holds its shape. Turn into wet mold, and at serving time unmold, and serve with orange sauce.
A gelatine snow or sponge, tinted pink and set in a mold — the sort of light dessert that filled the back pages of manufacturers' pamphlets in the 1910s and 1920s. It cannot be made safely in its printed form.
- Raw egg whiteThe beaten white is folded into a gelatine base that has been cooled to lukewarm and is never cooked afterwards. Nothing in the method brings the egg anywhere near a temperature that would deal with Salmonella, and the finished mold then sits at room temperature until serving. Use a current recipe if you want a gelatine sponge of this kind.
- Gelatine has changedPowdered gelatine sold today is standardized at roughly 1 envelope (about 2¼ teaspoons) to 2 cups of liquid. Early-century tablespoon measures of loose granulated gelatine were not necessarily equivalent, and old proportions can set stiffer than intended with modern gelatine.
- BloomingSoaking the gelatine in cold water before adding the boiling water is not optional fussiness — granules dropped straight into hot liquid clump and leave hard specks that never dissolve.
- "Dromedary Cocoanut"A brand of sweetened shredded coconut, sold moist in a package. Modern sweetened flake is the closest equivalent; unsweetened desiccated coconut is drier and noticeably less sweet.
- "Few drops red color"Period colorings were far weaker than today's concentrated gels. A single drop of a modern gel will take the mixture well past the pale pink intended here.
- "Wet mold"Rinsing the mold with cold water and leaving it damp — no oil, no grease. The film of water is what lets the set jelly release cleanly when the mold is dipped briefly in warm water and inverted.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield or mold size. The liquid is about a cup plus the soaking water and juice, and whipping with the beaten white expands it well beyond that volume.
Recipe pamphlets issued by food manufacturers were among the most widely read cookbooks in American homes in the first decades of the twentieth century, distributed free or for a few cents and built entirely around a single branded product. Dromedary, a Hills Brothers trademark best remembered for dates, also packed shredded coconut, and this booklet's job was to find as many uses for it as possible — hence a whole section of "simple cocoanut desserts" in which the coconut is folded into things it does not strictly need to be in. The dessert itself belongs to the family of gelatine "snows" and "sponges" that spread through household cookery after granulated gelatine became cheap and reliable in the late nineteenth century, freeing cooks from the long business of boiling down calves' feet. Whipping the half-set jelly with beaten egg white to double its bulk was the standard trick for making a little sweetened liquid look like a substantial molded dish.