Home › Fruit Desserts › Casserole of Oranges
Casserole of Oranges
6 oranges 1/4 ounce vegetable gelatine 8 ounces sugar Soak the gelatine in a pint of cold water; put it in a brass stewpan with the sugar, and let it boil for five minutes, taking care it does not burn. Have the oranges ready, peeled, and separated into quarters, taking out all seeds and all white skin, add them to the liquid, and boil for ten minutes. Take out the oranges, and place them in a mold. Reduce the liquid by boiling until it is barely enough to fill the mold, and pour over. Serve cold.
A very simple set fruit dessert that depends entirely on agar rather than animal gelatine, which is why it appears in a meatless book. A few of its terms and vessels need translating.
- "Casserole" means the mold"Casserole" here probably means the mold -- in this period a casserole was often a shaped case or mold of food turned out whole, not only a baked dish. Nothing here goes in the oven; the finished item is a molded jelly studded with orange segments. The recipe itself says only "a mold", so the sense of the title is inferred.
- Vegetable gelatine is agarSold then as agar-agar, kanten or Japanese isinglass, from red seaweed. A quarter ounce is about 7 g; in a pint (2 cups) of water that gives a firm, sliceable set rather than the tender wobble of animal gelatine.
- Agar must actually boilThis is the hinge. Agar will not dissolve by soaking or warming; it needs a full boil of several minutes, which is exactly what the recipe calls for. Undissolved agar leaves gritty threads and a jelly that never sets.
- It sets at room temperatureAgar gels at around 100F/38C and will not remelt in a warm room, so the mold firms up on the counter and unmolds cleanly. Chilling is for serving temperature, not for setting.
- Skip the brass panBrass and unlined copper react with the acid of citrus and can pick up a metallic taste and green tinge. Use stainless steel or another nonreactive pan.
- Sugar and yieldEight ounces of sugar is a little over a cup by measure, giving a distinctly sweet syrup. The recipe does not name a mold size; six oranges with the reduced syrup would suit something in the region of a quart and serve about six.
- The ten-minute boilModern segments from thin-skinned dessert oranges will slump badly after ten minutes of boiling. Lift them out as soon as they are heated through and translucent if you want them to keep their shape in the mold.
- Reducing the syrupBoiling the syrup down concentrates the agar as well as the sugar, so the final jelly sets harder than the original pint would suggest. Stop when it just covers the fruit in the mold.
Vegetarian and "meatless" cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had a standing problem with jellies and creams, since gelatine and isinglass are animal products. Agar-agar, extracted from red seaweeds and long used in Japan as kanten, filled the gap, and by the turn of the century it seems to have become available through Western pharmacies and grocers, a spread often linked to its adoption as a bacteriological culture medium in the early 1880s. Recipes like this one lean on its two useful peculiarities: it sets at room temperature and holds in warm weather, which made it attractive in kitchens without reliable refrigeration. The dish itself is a plain compote turned into a molded set piece, the sort of cold sweet a Victorian or Edwardian table expected at the end of a meal, achieved here without a scrap of animal product.