Orange Salad
INGREDIENTS for dish for 6 persons.-6 oranges, 1/4 lb. of muscatel raisins, 2 oz. of pounded sugar, 4 tablespoonfuls of brandy. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 3d. Peel 5 of the oranges; divide them into slices without breaking the pulp, and arrange them on a glass dish. Stone the raisins, mix them with the sugar and brandy, and mingle them with the oranges. Squeeze the juice of the other orange over the whole, and the dish is ready for table. A little pounded spice may be put in when the flavour is liked; but this ingredient must be added very sparinlgy.
SEASONABLE from November to May.
Orange Wine. (A very Simple and Easy Method of Making a very Superior.) -INGREDIENTS for 9 gallons.-90 Seville oranges, 32 lbs. of lump sugar, water. AVERAGE COST, 2s. per gallon.
Break up the sugar into small pieces and put it into a dry, sweet, 9-gallon cask, placed in a cellar or other storehouse, where it is intended to be kept. Have ready close to the cask two large pans or wooden keelers, into one of which put the peel of the oranges pared quite thin, and into the other the pulp after the juice has been squeezed from it. Strain the juice through a piece of double muslin, and put into the cask with the sugar. Then pour about 1½ gallon of cold spring water on both the peels and the pulp; let it stand for 24 hours, and then strain it into the cask; add more water to the peels and pulp when this is done, and repeat the same process every day for a week: it should take about a week to fill up the cask. Be careful to apportion the quantity as nearly as possible to the seven days, and to stir the contents of the cask each day. On the third day after the cask is full-that is, the tenth day after the commencement of making-the cask may be securely bunged down. This is a very simple and easy method, and the wine made according to it will be pronounced to be most excellent. There is no troublesome boiling, and all fermentation takes place in the cask. When the above directions are attended to, the wine cannot ORANGES, DISH OF. fail to be good. It should be bottled in 8 or 9 months, and will be fit for use in a twelvemonth after the time of making.
Ginger wine may be made in precisely the same manner, only, with the 9-gallon cask for ginger wine, 2 lbs. of the best whole ginger, bruised, must be put with the sugar.
It will be found convenient to tie the ginger loosely in a muslin bag.
TIME.-Altogether, 10 days to make it.
SEASONABLE. - Make this in March, and bottle it in the following January.
Two recipes share this page: a dessert salad that takes ten minutes, and a nine-gallon country wine that takes a year. The notes below cover both.
- Yield and place at tableThe salad serves six and belongs at the end of the meal, in the Victorian dessert course, not as a side dish. The recipe assumes it goes straight to table once assembled.
- Pounded sugarThis means sugar crushed fine in a mortar — caster (superfine) sugar is the direct modern equivalent. Two ounces is about 60 g, and 4 tablespoons of brandy is roughly 60 ml.
- Muscatel raisinsA quarter pound is about 115 g. Victorian muscatels came as whole dried bunches still on the stalk and contained seeds, hence the instruction to stone them. Muscat raisins sold loose today are already seedless; use them as they are.
- Cutting the oranges"Divide them into slices without breaking the pulp" is the hinge of the dish. Cut away peel and white pith with a knife rather than peeling by hand, then slice across into rounds or cut out the segments between the membranes; any pith left on turns the whole thing bitter as it sits in the brandy.
- Pounded spiceGround cinnamon, mace or a little clove. Beeton's warning is sound — a pinch for six oranges is plenty, since spice quickly overtakes the citrus.
- Seasonable November to MayThis reflects the old winter shipping season for Mediterranean oranges. Blood oranges, which arrive in the same months, suit the dish particularly well.
- The wine: scale and vesselA 9-gallon cask is about 41 litres — a full firkin, and far more than most kitchens can house. Ninety Seville oranges and 32 lb (14.5 kg) of sugar are proportioned to that volume; scaling down means scaling the water down with it, which the recipe never quantifies precisely beyond roughly a gallon and a half a day for a week.
- The wine: fermentation as writtenThis is a wild ferment, relying on yeasts on the fruit and in the cask. There is no yeast pitched, no hydrometer, no airlock, and the cask is bunged tight on the third day after filling — while fermentation is still active. A sealed vessel under active ferment builds real pressure. Modern winemaking practice uses a cultured yeast, an airlock during primary fermentation, and sanitised equipment throughout; follow a current recipe if you want to attempt it.
- Seville orangesThese are the bitter marmalade oranges, in season in Britain for a few weeks in January and February. They are not interchangeable with the sweet oranges of the salad above.
Both recipes come out of the same household economy: a winter glut of imported citrus and a cellar expected to hold its own drink. Oranges reached British ports through the winter and early spring from Spain, Portugal and the Azores, which is why Beeton marks the salad seasonable November to May, and why Seville fruit — bitter, thick-skinned, arriving in a short January window — went straight into marmalade or, as here, into a cask. Muscatel raisins were a luxury sold in flat boxes with the fruit still clinging to its stalks, a Christmas-table item as much as a baking ingredient, and pairing them with brandy and orange puts this salad squarely in the dessert course of a well-off Victorian dinner. The wine belongs to the long English tradition of country or "made" wines, brewed from whatever fruit or flower was cheap at the moment; the boast that there is "no troublesome boiling" is aimed at housekeepers familiar with more laborious methods that required the must to be boiled and skimmed before casking.