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Orange Filling
1/2 cup sugar 2 1/2 tablespoons flour Grated rind of 1/2 orange 1/4 cup cream 1/2 tablespoon lemon juice 1 tablespoon butter Mix ingredients in order given. Cook ten minutes in a double boiler, stirring constantly. Cool before spreading.
A small cooked cream filling for a layer cake, thickened with flour rather than eggs or cornstarch. It is short on liquid as printed, so read the notes before you start.
- The liquid looks shortA half cup of sugar plus 2 1/2 tablespoons flour with only 1/4 cup cream and a little lemon juice will set into a stiff paste rather than a spreadable filling. Other orange fillings of the type use the juice of the orange as well as the rind; if you want a filling you can spread, count on adding the juice of that half orange, or thin with milk at the end.
- Orange juice and flourCitrus juice added to a raw flour slurry will not stop it thickening, but stir the juice in near the end of cooking if you want the flavour bright rather than cooked-out.
- Double boiler, not direct heatThe point of the double boiler is that a flour-and-cream mixture this thick and this sugary scorches instantly on a burner. Keep the water below the upper pan simmering, not boiling hard, and do not let the pan bottom touch the water.
- Ten minutes is not paddingFlour-thickened fillings taste pasty until the starch is fully cooked. The mixture will look done in three or four minutes; hold it the full ten, stirring, to cook out the raw taste.
- Cream"Cream" in a book of this period is unlikely to mean today's heavy cream; something in the range of half-and-half to light cream is the closest modern match. Heavy cream works and gives a richer filling; whole milk is thinner but acceptable.
- Grating the rindTake only the coloured zest and none of the white pith, which is bitter and will not soften during the short cooking.
- CoolingCool to room temperature before spreading or it will soak into the crumb and slump out at the edges. A skin forms as it cools; press plastic wrap to the surface or stir it smooth again before use.
- YieldAbout 3/4 cup, enough to fill one two-layer 8- or 9-inch cake. It will not stretch to cover the top and sides.
Cooked flour-and-cream fillings like this one belong to the era before the electric mixer, when a layer cake might be filled with something stirred on the stove. Their appearance in a meatless cookbook is not accidental: books of this kind still needed to cover the whole domestic repertoire, so a frostings chapter sits alongside the bean loaves and vegetable roasts. The filling is also a study in economy, spinning a half cup of sugar, a spoonful of butter and the rind of half an orange into enough to dress a cake. In the background, orange as a cake flavouring is generally said to have become ordinary in American home baking as Florida and California citrus reached northern markets by rail through the late nineteenth century.