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Orange Flower Icing
Prepare flowers as above, boiling in with the syrup until the syrup is ready to slightly harden in cold water. Then whip in with the stiff-beaten white of an egg and spread on cake or cookies.
A boiled-syrup icing — essentially an Italian meringue perfumed with orange blossoms — written in the shorthand of a book that assumed you had just read the preceding entry. Quantities are absent, so treat the original as a method and supply your own proportions.
- "Flowers as above"The instruction depends on a preceding recipe for preparing orange blossoms, which is not reproduced on this page. Preparation of citrus blossoms generally involves removing the green calyx and stem and discarding bruised petals; the white heel at the base of the petal is bitter and is often trimmed away.
- Use true orange blossom onlyCitrus flowers are edible; ornamental shrubs sold as "mock orange" (Philadelphus) are not the same plant and should not go into food. Use blossoms from an untreated citrus tree, or substitute a teaspoon of orange flower water added to the finished icing.
- The syrup stage"Ready to slightly harden in cold water" points to the firm-ball to hard-ball range, roughly 245-265F on a modern thermometer. Below that the icing will not set; well above it the meringue turns brittle and grainy.
- Working proportionsFor one egg white, about 1 cup sugar boiled with 1/4 cup water and a handful of blossoms gives enough icing for a single 8-inch layer or two dozen cookies.
- How to combineHave the white beaten stiff before the syrup is ready, then pour the hot syrup down the side of the bowl in a thin stream while beating. Adding it all at once cooks the white into threads.
- Strain or leave inPetals boiled in syrup go limp and can be strained out for a clear icing, or left in for flecks of candied blossom. Straining costs little in flavour, most of which has already passed into the syrup.
- SettingSpread while still warm and pliable; it stiffens quickly as it cools. Left uncovered for a few hours it forms a thin crust and keeps its shape on a cut cake.
Floral flavourings were ordinary kitchen stock through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when rose water and orange flower water did much of the work now given to vanilla extract. Orange blossom in particular came into European and then American cookery by way of the Mediterranean citrus trade, and its distilled essence, neroli, was equally at home in perfumery — a reminder that the still room served both the kitchen and the dressing table. Candied and syruped blossoms were a way of holding a very brief spring crop through the year, and this icing is that preservation trick pressed into service on a cake: the sugar carries the scent, the beaten white carries the sugar.