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Jelly Oranges
Dissolve one package gelatine in one cup cold water, afterwards adding two cups boiling water to thoroughly dissolve it. Add then three cups white sugar, one-quarter teaspoonful cinnamon, grated rind of three oranges, juice of twelve fine oranges. Strain through a flannel bag into a pitcher, without shaking or squeezing. Extract the pulp from the orange, by making a hole in one end of it large enough to admit a mustard spoon. Soak the rind a few hours, and then pour the jelly into each orange through the whole at the end. Then set aside to congeal. Garnish with orange leaves. Cut each orange in two. A very ornamental dish.--Mrs. Mc G.
A Victorian showpiece: orange jelly set inside the hollowed shells, then halved so each portion looks like a segment of fruit. Nothing here is difficult, but the gelatine quantity and the hollowing method both need translating.
- What a "package" of gelatine wasNineteenth-century boxed gelatine was commonly sold in packages of about an ounce, though sizes varied by maker; an ounce is the equivalent of the four quarter-ounce envelopes in a modern box. On that reckoning the six-odd cups of liquid here set to a firm, sliceable jelly rather than a spoonable one, which is what you need if the halves are to hold their shape.
- Soften, then dissolveSprinkle the gelatine over the cup of cold water and leave it five minutes to swell before the boiling water goes in. Stir until no grains remain, and keep it off the heat afterwards; gelatine loses strength if it is boiled.
- Twelve oranges of juiceTwelve medium oranges give about three cups of juice, so the total liquid is close to six cups. If your fruit is small, make the shortfall up with water rather than adding more juice than the gelatine can carry.
- The sugarThree cups is very sweet by current taste; the oranges available in 1879 were likely to be more sour and seedy than modern fruit. Two cups is ample with modern navels; sugar contributes body as well as sweetness, so do not cut it much further.
- Straining through flannelA flannel jelly bag is a doubled square of muslin or four layers of cheesecloth today. The instruction not to shake or squeeze it is the point of the whole exercise: pressure pushes pulp and oil through and the jelly turns cloudy instead of glassy.
- Hollowing the shellsA mustard spoon is a narrow condiment spoon about the width of a finger. Cut a neat round hole at the stem end, work the flesh loose with a small serrated knife, and scoop it out with a grapefruit spoon, leaving the white pith intact so the shell does not collapse. The recipe's direction to soak the rind a few hours is unexplained; soaking the emptied shells in cold water will firm them and rinse out loose fibre.
- Setting and cuttingStand the filled oranges upright in a muffin tin or bowl of rice and refrigerate at least six hours, preferably overnight. Cut them with a thin sharp knife dipped in hot water and wiped between cuts.
- YieldTwelve oranges halved gives twenty-four servings, which is a party dish rather than a family dessert. Halve everything for a smaller table.
Jellies moulded in their own fruit shells were a standing feature of the ornamental Victorian dessert table, made easier by the commercial sheet and powdered gelatines that became available to American kitchens from the middle of the century and gradually reduced the old labour of boiling calves' feet for hours to get a setting stock. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by some 250 Virginia housekeepers, is full of such signed recipes, and the initials at the end were part of the book's appeal: readers knew whose table a dish came from. The cost of twelve fine oranges plus three cups of white sugar marks this as a recipe for a household with means and a reason to show it.