Oranges, Iced
INGREDIENTS.- Oranges; to every lb. of pounded loaf sugar allow the whites of 2 eggs.
Whisk the whites of the eggs well, stir in the sugar, and beat this mixture for hour. Skin the oranges, remove as much of the white pith as possible without injuring the pulp of the fruit; pass a thread through the centre of each orange, dip them into the sugar, and tie them to a stick. Place this stick across the oven, and let the oranges remain until dry, when they will have the appearance of balls of ice. They make a pretty dessert or supper dish. Care must be taken not to have the oven too fierce, or the oranges would scorch and acquire a brown colour, which would entirely spoil their appearance.
TIME.-From 1/2 to 1 hour to dry in a moderate oven.
SEASONABLE from November to May.
A dessert-table conceit rather than a cooked dish: whole peeled oranges are jacketed in royal icing and dried until they look like snowballs. Two fractions have dropped out of the text in printing, and the oven instruction is the part that decides whether it works.
- The missing fractions"Beat this mixture for hour" and "From to 1 hour" both originally carried fractions that have been lost in this edition. Beat the icing for a quarter of an hour or so, until it is glossy and holds a peak, and reckon on half an hour to an hour of drying.
- Oven heat is the hingeIgnore "moderate oven" here; the term is usually glossed at somewhere around 350F. At that heat the icing browns and the fruit weeps, exactly the fault Beeton warns against. You want a drying heat, not a baking one: the lowest setting your oven offers, with the door ajar if it will not go below about 200F. In a Victorian range this stage would most likely have been done in a falling oven after the day's baking.
- Pounded loaf sugarLoaf sugar was a hard cone broken up and pounded in a mortar. Use icing (confectioners') sugar for a smooth coat, or caster sugar if you want the faint grain of the original.
- Proportions and yieldOne pound of sugar to two whites is standard royal icing, and it makes far more than a few oranges need. Half a pound of sugar to one white will coat roughly four to six oranges; the coating should be thick enough to cling, not runny.
- Raw egg whiteThe icing is dried, not cooked to any safe temperature, so the whites stay effectively raw. Use pasteurised egg white if serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised.
- Preparing the fruitPeel and remove the pith without breaking the membrane, or juice will seep and streak the icing. Blot the fruit thoroughly dry before dipping, and choose thick-skinned, firm oranges that hold their shape.
- Suspending themThreading each orange and hanging it from a stick laid across the oven keeps the coating unmarked. A skewer or wooden spoon handle balanced across a deep roasting tin does the same job, or set them on a wire rack and accept a flat patch underneath.
- ServingBest on the day they are made. The icing softens as the fruit gives up moisture, and by the next morning the white shell has usually gone patchy and dull.
"Iced" here means iced in the older sense of frosted or covered with icing, not frozen; the whole point is the resemblance to a ball of ice, a piece of table theatre for the dessert course. Beeton's Book of Household Management is full of these visual set pieces, which belonged to a period when dessert was arranged and looked at as much as eaten. The seasonal note, November to May, tracks the arrival of Mediterranean oranges in British markets, and it is a reminder that citrus was still a winter luxury with a defined season rather than a year-round staple. The technique itself is simply royal icing, the same egg-white-and-sugar paste used to coat wedding cakes, applied to fruit instead of cake and then left to dry.