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Orange Sauce
Cream together one cup sugar; half-cup butter, and one cup orange juice.
FILLING FOR ORANGE PIE OR BAKED PUDDING Pare to the juice-pulp. one large orange, halve and core it and cut into small pieces. Add three-fourths cup sugar and set aside. In another vessel mix smooth two tablespoonfuls of cornstarch with three-fourths cup of sweet milk. Add the zest (see The Lemon) of two oranges or grated rind of one, with one tablespoon of butter. Bring this to a boil (in double cooking-vessel) when add the yolks of two well-beaten eggs, stir well, and remove at once from the fire. Have ready the pastry baked to a pale brown. Line crust with the sliced orange; pour over it the custard, and bake a few minutes in a hot oven. When done place on the top a meringue made of the stiff-beaten whites of the eggs and a half-cup of sugar, and brown quickly in the oven.
Two recipes have been run together here by the printer: a creamed orange sauce, then a pie filling whose heading appears mid-sentence, with the first words of its instructions ("Pare to the juice-pulp") stranded ahead of it. Read them as separate items.
- The sauce is a creamed hard sauceThe sauce is creamed in the manner of a hard sauce -- One cup sugar, half a cup butter and one cup juice is a very high proportion of liquid to fat. Add the juice a spoonful at a time to fully creamed butter and sugar or it will break; keep it cold and spoon it over hot pudding, where it melts into a sauce.
- "Pare to the juice-pulp"Cut away peel, white pith and membrane so only the juicy flesh remains — what would now be called supreming the orange. Halving and coring means removing the fibrous centre and any seeds.
- Sweet milkPlain unsoured whole milk, named to distinguish it from buttermilk or clabbered milk, both also found in a period kitchen. Whole milk is the right substitute.
- Double cooking-vesselA double boiler. The cornstarch-milk mixture must actually come to a boil over the water to cook out the starch, then the beaten yolks go in off the direct heat and the pan comes off the moment they thicken, or they curdle.
- Hot ovenRoughly 400-450F. The shell is already baked pale brown, so the few minutes in a hot oven are only to set the filling against the fruit; the meringue is then browned quickly at the same heat, watching closely.
- Zest of two orangesThe book cross-refers to its lemon entry; zest means the coloured outer rind only, free of pith. Grated rind of one orange is offered as the alternative.
- Meringue proportionsHalf a cup of sugar to two whites is generous and will weep if the sugar is not beaten in slowly after the whites hold soft peaks. Spread it so it touches the crust all round to stop it shrinking.
Oranges appear in late nineteenth-century American cookbooks as a fruit that was becoming steadily easier to get, though for many households it remained a seasonal treat well into the next century: refrigerated rail cars and the expansion of Florida and California groves put whole boxes of them within reach of ordinary households, and compilers found room for them beyond eating them out of hand. A collection like this one, organised fruit by fruit, reflects that shift — the orange gets a sauce, a pie, a pudding filling and a set of instructions on zest, treated as a working kitchen staple rather than a treat. The pie itself belongs to the large family of cornstarch-and-yolk custard pies finished with a meringue made from the leftover whites, a thrifty structure shared with lemon meringue and the various "cream" pies of the same decades.