Home › Pudding Sauces › Orange Float
Orange Float
1 quart water Juice of 2 lemons 1 cup sugar 4 tablespoons cornstarch Oranges Boil the water, lemon juice and sugar.
While boiling, add the cornstarch and boil for 15 minutes. When cool, pour it over 5 sliced oranges. Spread meringue over top.
A cornstarch-thickened lemon jelly poured over sliced oranges — closer to a moulded dessert than a sauce, despite its place in the pudding-sauce chapter. Two things in the original need rethinking: the length of the boil and the undefined meringue.
- Do not boil for 15 minutesCornstarch reaches full thickening power within two to three minutes of coming to a boil. Prolonged boiling in the presence of lemon juice breaks the starch down and the mixture sets thin and slack, which is the opposite of the intent. Bring it just to a boil, hold it a minute or two until glossy, then take it off.
- Add the starch as a slurryDry cornstarch tipped into boiling liquid seizes into lumps. Slake the 4 tablespoons in about 1/3 cup cold water first, then stir it into the boiling syrup.
- Acid last, if you want a firmer setLemon juice added at the start gives the acid the whole cooking time to hydrolyse the starch. Boiling the water and sugar, thickening, then stirring in the juice off the heat produces a cleaner, brighter gel.
- Proportions1 quart is 4 cups; 4 tablespoons cornstarch to 4 cups liquid is a soft, spoonable set rather than a sliceable one. Juice of 2 lemons is roughly 1/4 to 1/3 cup.
- The meringue is unspecifiedThe book assumes you know: 2 egg whites beaten stiff with about 2 tablespoons sugar for this quantity. As written it goes on raw and is never cooked, so it will be an uncooked egg-white foam. Either brown it briefly in a hot oven (425F, 4-5 minutes) before chilling, use a cooked or Italian meringue, or substitute sweetened whipped cream.
- Assembly and chilling"When cool" means cool but still pourable — once it sets in the pan it cannot be poured over the fruit. Layer the orange slices in a glass bowl, pour over, then chill several hours until set.
- YieldServes 6 to 8 in glasses or a single 2-quart dish. Best eaten the day it is made; the oranges shed juice and weep into the jelly overnight.
A "float" in North American cookery of this period was generally any dessert in which something light rode on top of something liquid — most often beaten egg white or whipped cream floated over a custard, a fruit syrup or a thin jelly. The name describes the look in the glass, not a technique. Its filing here among pudding sauces reflects how loosely such books drew the line: a sweetened, thickened liquid could be poured over cake as a sauce or set with fruit and served alone. The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Winnipeg and Montreal, and its recipes were drawn largely from contributions sent in by users of the company's flour, which may account for the telegraphic instructions and the assumption that any cook already knows how to make a meringue.