Orange Creams
INGREDIENTS for 8 creams.-1 Seville orange, 1 tablespoonful of brandy, lb. of loaf sugar, the yolks of 4 eggs, 1 pint of cream. AVERAGE COST, 2s.
Boil the rind of the Seville orange until tender, and beat it in a mortar to a pulp; add to it the brandy, the strained juice of the orange, and the sugar, and beat all together for about 10 minutes, adding the well-beaten yolks of eggs. Bring the cream to the boiling point and pour it very gradually to the other ingredients, and beat the mixture till nearly cold; put it into custardcups, place the cups in a deep dish of boiling water, where let them remain till quite cold. Take the cups out of the water, wipe them, and garnish the tops of the creams with candied orange-peel or preserved chips.
TIME.-Altogether, hour.
SEASONABLE from November to May.
Note. To render this dish more economical, substitute milk for the cream, but add a small pinch of isinglass or gelatine to make the creams firm.
A tempered egg-yolk cream flavoured with bitter orange, set in cups rather than baked. Two of the quantities have lost their fractions in transcription, so read the ingredient list with care before scaling.
- Missing fractions"lb. of loaf sugar" and "TIME.-Altogether, hour" have both dropped their fractions in this printing. For eight small custard cups, a quarter-pound (about 115 g) of sugar is the plausible reading, and half an hour the plausible time, but neither can be recovered with certainty from the text as it stands.
- Pint and creamAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, or 570 ml. That is a generous amount of cream for eight small cups; single (light) cream at around 18 per cent fat gives a texture closer to the original than modern double cream, which will set very stiff.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar was sold in hard cones and broken or crushed for use. Caster or granulated sugar is the direct equivalent; nothing about the recipe needs the lumps.
- Seville orangeThe bitter marmalade orange, in British shops for a few weeks in January and February. If you cannot find one, use the zest of a sweet orange plus the juice of half a lemon, which approximates the sharpness though not the perfume.
- Boiling the rindSimmer the whole rind 30-45 minutes until a skewer passes through easily, changing the water once if you want less bitterness. A mortar gives a coarser, more interesting pulp than a food processor, which tends to turn it to paste.
- TemperingThe hinge of the dish. Pour the hot cream into the yolk mixture in a thin stream while beating constantly; add it too fast and the yolks scramble, and no amount of beating afterwards will bring them back.
- The water bath and coolingStanding the cups in boiling water off the heat appears intended to finish the custard gently. Modern practice is to cook the mixture over low heat or a bain-marie to 80C/175F, when it coats a spoon, then chill it promptly in the refrigerator rather than leaving it to cool for hours at room temperature.
- IsinglassThe fish-derived setting agent of the note has largely dropped out of kitchen use. If you make the economical version with milk, about half a teaspoon of powdered gelatine per pint, softened in a little cold milk and stirred into the hot liquid, will do the same job.
- YieldEight small custard cups, of roughly 90 ml each on the recipe's own quantities, which is a Victorian portion. Four modern ramekins is a more usual serving.
"Creams" occupy a long run of pages in Mrs Beeton, and the word covers a family of set or whipped desserts rather than a single dish: lemon creams, coffee creams, Italian creams, all built on cream, sugar and either eggs or a setting agent. The Seville orange here is the marmalade orange, too sour to eat out of hand, which arrived in British ports from Spain in midwinter and gave a bitterness that sweet oranges cannot; the fruit's season is short, and the "seasonable from November to May" note extends well beyond it, which may reflect the keeping of candied peel such as the recipe uses for garnish. The concluding suggestion to substitute milk and add isinglass is of a piece with the book's habit of giving the expensive version first and appending a cheaper one, and of attaching an average cost to the dish.