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Mint Orange Plate
4 seedless oranges 1 cup green after dinner mints 6 springs of fresh mint Wash oranges and chill well. Cut into halves with sharp knife, then into small three cornered wedges, cutting toward center, leaving the peel on. Arrange on plates around mounds of crushed after dinner mints. Garnish with a sprig of mint. Serves 6.
A three-ingredient fruit plate from the era when a dessert course could be assembled rather than cooked. The only technical demands are cold oranges and a clean cut.
- After-dinner mintsThese are the small, thin, pastel cream mints served with coffee — soft-centred fondant wafers, not hard peppermint candies or chocolate-covered mints. Butter mints or the pillow-shaped pulled-cream mints sold for weddings are the closest current equivalent.
- Crushing themFondant mints crush cleanly in a bag with a rolling pin if they are dry and slightly stale; fresh soft ones will smear into paste. Leave them open to the air for a day first, and crush shortly before serving so the sugar does not draw moisture and clump.
- Cutting the orangesThe recipe calls only for halving with a sharp knife, then cutting each half into small three-cornered wedges toward the centre with the peel left on; it does not say which way to halve. Use a thin, genuinely sharp blade.
- ChillingThe oranges are chilled whole before cutting, and the contrast between cold fruit and the sugar is the point of the dish. Cut citrus surfaces dry and dull fairly quickly, so cut close to serving.
- YieldFour oranges across six plates is eight halves for six servings, so the wedges have to be distributed across plates rather than served as neat halves. Six oranges would give each plate a whole fruit's worth.
- Fresh mintThe mint sold fresh for garnish is usually spearmint. Slap the sprig once between your palms before laying it down to release the oil.
Plates like this belong to the light, decorative entertaining style of the interwar decades, when menu books sold arrangement as much as cookery -- food that presented well, could be prepared ahead, and leaned on manufactured confectionery as an ingredient. After-dinner mints were a familiar part of the period's table, passed with coffee to close a meal, so building a dessert course around them turned an expected gesture into the dish itself. Seedless oranges shipped from California and Florida were also widely available in northern markets by this date.