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Orange Preserves
Peel a thin rind off the oranges and make a hole in each end, getting out all the seed. Pour boiling water over them and let them stand till next morning. If the water tastes bitter, search for seed. Pour boiling water over them every day, as long as the bitterness remains. Boil till soft enough to run a straw through them. Add a pound and a half sugar to each pound fruit. Make a thin syrup of half the sugar, and boil the oranges in it a short time. Let them stand in the syrup three days, then pour the syrup from the fruit, put the rest of the sugar to it, and boil it down thick. Then pour it over the fruit. A few lemons added is a great improvement.--Mrs. J. H.
A whole-fruit preserve of the old school: the oranges are debittered over several days of boiling-water changes, then candied slowly in a syrup that is strengthened in stages. The method is sound, but it assumes you know what the stages are for.
- The hinge: staged sugarThe oranges go first into a thin syrup made from half the sugar, then rest three days before the syrup is concentrated with the rest. This gradual increase lets sugar diffuse into the fruit instead of drawing water out of it; dumping all 1½ lb in at once shrivels and toughens the peel.
- Which orangesThe recipe assumes a seedy fruit, since it directs removing all the seed and hunting for missed pips; it does not say which kind. Modern navel oranges are seedless, sweeter and thicker-pithed, so the days of soaking will do less and the result will be blander. Seville oranges, or small thin-skinned sweet oranges, come closest.
- "Peel a thin rind off"This means paring away only the outer coloured zest, where most of the bitter oil sits, leaving the fruit whole. Do not peel down to the flesh or the oranges will collapse in the syrup.
- The soaking daysThe recipe sets no number: the boiling water is renewed daily for as long as the bitterness remains. The instruction to "search for seed" if the water still tastes bitter is literal, since crushed pips release a good deal of bitterness.
- "Soft enough to run a straw through"A straw served as the period's tester. A toothpick or thin bamboo skewer should pass through the peel with no resistance; the time varies with the fruit, and it must reach this point before any sugar touches it, since sugar firms the peel.
- "Boil it down thick"The final syrup wants roughly 220–222°F on a thermometer, or the stage where a spoonful sheets off rather than dripping. Take it much past that and it will crystallise around the fruit as it cools.
- The lemonsThe recipe says only that "a few lemons added is a great improvement", without saying whether they go in whole or as juice. Acid does help keep a heavily sugared syrup from graining.
- Yield and keepingThe recipe gives no yield and no sealing instructions. For storage at room temperature, follow current water-bath canning directions; otherwise refrigerate and use within a couple of months.
Whole preserved oranges belong to the long European tradition of candying citrus that reached the American South through English cookery books, where "orange marmalet" and preserved oranges appear from the seventeenth century onward. In Virginia, oranges arrived by coastal and Caribbean trade as a winter luxury, and the point of a recipe like this was to hold that luxury through the year in a sugar syrup. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878) was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named and initialled housekeepers, which is why this one carries only "Mrs. J. H." — the book reads as a collective record of what particular households actually did, bitterness tests and three-day waits included. The generous 1½ pounds of sugar to a pound of fruit reflects both the preserving science of the day, where sugar was the only reliable keeper available, and the fact that refined sugar had by then become cheap enough to use lavishly.