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Orange Custard
Strain the juice of 5 oranges and sweeten with powdered loaf sugar. Stir it over the fire until quite hot, then remove and allow to cool. When nearly cold, add the well-beaten yolks of 5 eggs, ½ pint milk and a few drops of ratafia. Put the whole into a saucepan and stir over a clear fire until it thickens. Pour into custard glasses and serve cold.
A stirred custard sharpened with orange juice, which makes it more temperamental than a plain one: acid and egg protein both want to set, and they will curdle at a lower temperature than a milk custard alone. Everything below serves that one problem.
- The hinge: keep it below a simmerCook the finished mixture to about 170-175F, stirring constantly, and pull it the moment it coats the back of a spoon. Because of the orange acid it will scramble well short of boiling; a heatproof bowl over barely simmering water gives far more control than the "clear fire" of the original.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar broken from a cone, and "powdered" meant pounded fine rather than the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Use ordinary granulated or caster sugar, roughly 1/3 to 1/2 cup depending on how sharp the oranges are.
- RatafiaRatafia essence was an almond flavouring, historically distilled from bitter almonds or peach and apricot kernels. Modern almond extract is the direct replacement; a few drops is genuinely all that is wanted, as it will bury the orange.
- Half a pint of milkThis is a Canadian book of the imperial period, so half a pint is 10 fluid ounces, about 1 1/4 cups. Whole milk is right; the custard is thin by design and cream will make it heavy against the fruit.
- Five orangesModern oranges, particularly navels, are likely to be sweeter and larger than the fruit the book assumed. Five will yield somewhere near 1 1/2 cups of juice today, which is a lot of acid for five yolks -- strain it twice and taste for sweetness before the eggs go in.
- Why the juice is heated firstHeating the sweetened juice will at least dissolve the sugar completely; the recipe then has you cool it before the yolks go in. Follow it: add the juice to the eggs when it is nearly cold, not warm, or you risk cooking them on contact.
- Straining and servingPass the thickened custard through a fine sieve into the glasses to catch any threads of set egg. Chill at least three hours; it will thicken further as it cools. Fills four to six small custard glasses.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell its flour, and alongside its baking chapters it carries a broad household repertoire of the sort found in English domestic cookery. Stirred orange custard belongs to the long line of English "boiled custards" that ran from the eighteenth century through the Victorian kitchen, served in small footed custard glasses as a light finish -- which is how this recipe directs it. Ratafia, an almond note, was commonly added to fruit and cream preparations of the period.