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Orange and Rice
Pare oranges, cut in halves crosswise and remove the core. Cook the halves in a sirup made from equal parts of sugar and water, to which a little lemon-juice has been added, until they are tender but not broken. Place around a mound of boiled rice and pour the sirup over the whole. Serve with plain or whipped cream, or a custard sauce.
A plain composed dessert of the sort The New Delineator Recipes favored: fruit poached in syrup, banked against rice, sauced at the table. The original assumes you know how to make both syrup and boiled rice, so the quantities are yours to set.
- The syrupEqual parts sugar and water by volume makes a simple syrup of the usual strength; about a cup of each should be enough to poach four oranges. A tablespoon of lemon juice keeps it from tasting flatly sweet and helps prevent the sugar crystallizing.
- "Pare" means peel to the fleshRemove the skin and all white pith with a knife rather than your fingers, following the curve of the fruit. Pith left on will turn bitter as it cooks in sugar.
- The coreOnce halved crosswise, the tough central column of pith pulls out with the point of a paring knife. Left in, it stays fibrous in the finished dish.
- Poaching timeSomething like eight to twelve minutes at a bare simmer, turning once, should do for a navel orange, but go by the recipe's own test: tender but not broken. A hard boil risks breaking the segment walls and leaving you shreds in syrup.
- Choose the right orangeNavels or another seedless variety with a thick, easily removed peel are easiest to handle; thin-skinned juice oranges such as Valencias are harder to pare cleanly and more likely to break up in the syrup.
- "Boiled rice" in this book"Boiled rice" -- Plain white rice cooked in salted water until tender and drained, not a milk pudding; that is what the term ordinarily meant in cookbooks of this period. It should be dry enough to mound; about 1 cup raw rice serves four to six. Press it into a bowl and unmold onto the platter for a clean shape.
- Reducing the syrupLift the oranges out and boil the syrup down for a few minutes before pouring, or it will thin out over the rice and pool. It should coat a spoon lightly.
- ServingFour oranges and a cup of raw rice will stretch to about six modest servings. Warm rice with cool oranges reads oddly to a modern palate; you might assemble everything at room temperature, or chill the whole thing and serve with cold custard sauce.
Orange desserts of this kind belong to a long line of European fruit-and-rice dishes, of which the best known is the French riz à l'impératrice; a rice mound ringed with poached or candied fruit was a familiar confectioner's pattern in the nineteenth century. What dates this version is its plainness. Published for the readers of The Delineator, a mass-market women's magazine, it uses no gelatin, no mold, and no almond flavoring, and it treats oranges as an everyday item rather than a luxury — plausible enough by the 1920s, with Florida and California citrus moving north and east by refrigerated rail.