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Orange Fool
Add gradually the juice of three large and very sweet oranges to eight thoroughly beaten eggs, then whip in a halfpint of cream, a little grated nutmeg, and sugar as required. Place in a double boiler and let thicken but not boil. When thick pour into a heated glass dish and let cool. Place on ice and when chilled serve with cream.
An old-style fool: a cooked orange custard rather than the modern folded purée and whipped cream. The whole dish turns on gentle heat and on how the acid meets the eggs.
- The hinge: never let it boilHold the double boiler water at a bare shiver and stir constantly; the custard is done at about 170-175F, when it coats a spoon and holds a drawn line. Orange juice is acidic enough that the eggs will curdle well below boiling if the pan is rushed.
- Add the juice gradually, and warmThe instruction to add juice "gradually" is not decorative. Dumping cold acidic juice into beaten eggs sets them in threads. Whisk it in a spoonful at a time, and strain the finished custard through a sieve as insurance.
- A halfpint of creamOne US cup. If the book is British, an imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, so about 1 1/4 cups. Either works; the smaller amount gives a firmer set.
- Eight eggs is right for the periodEight eggs makes a very rich custard -- Eight whole eggs to a cup of cream and roughly a cup of juice (what three large oranges give) produces a dense custard, much firmer than a mousse. Halving the eggs gives something looser and more familiar, if that is what you want.
- Sugar as requiredStart with 1/3 cup and taste the mixture; very sweet juice oranges, as the recipe specifies, need little. Beat the sugar into the eggs first so it dissolves.
- The heated glass dishWarming the serving dish guards against thermal shock when hot custard meets cold glass. Modern tempered glass is more forgiving, but rinsing the bowl in hot water still helps.
- Chilling"Place on ice" meant a bed of ice or the icebox; the modern equivalent is the refrigerator. Cover the surface with cling film pressed directly onto the custard, and give it at least four hours; overnight is better.
- YieldSix to eight small portions. Zest from one of the oranges, stirred in at the end, sharpens a custard that can otherwise taste flat once cold.
A fool in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a cooked cream dish, not the folded purée we mean now — early English recipe books give fools thickened with eggs and flavoured with rosewater, sack or citrus. The name is generally traced to the sense of "fool" as something trifling, in the same spirit that gave us trifle itself, though the derivation from French fouler, to crush, is often repeated and cannot be settled. The recipe here preserves that older, custard-based form, rather than the later gooseberry and raspberry fools made with nothing but fruit and whipped cream.