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Orange Filling
Juice of 1 orange, juice of 1/2 lemon; fill cup with water, put in small pan, add 1/3 cup of sugar, bring to a boil and stir in 1/3 cup of sugar and 2 tablespoons of flour stirred together; take from fire and add 1 egg well beaten and 1 teaspoon of butter; set back on fire until egg is set. 2 cups confectioner's sugar 1/2 cup butter Cream until light.
A cooked citrus filling for a layer cake, with what is plainly a separate butter icing tacked on at the end. The two are meant to be used together on one cake: filling between the layers, creamed butter and sugar on top.
- The liquid measure"Fill cup with water" means put the orange and lemon juice in a measuring cup and top up to a full 1 cup (8 oz). Juice from one orange varies from about 1/4 to 1/2 cup, so the water does the balancing.
- The sugar, read carefullySugar is added twice: 1/3 cup into the pan with the juice, then a second 1/3 cup rubbed together with the flour and stirred in. Total 2/3 cup. Mixing the flour with dry sugar before it meets the liquid helps keep it from lumping.
- Cook the flour outOnce the flour goes in, keep it at a bare simmer for two to three minutes, stirring. Flour thickens almost immediately but tastes pasty until it has cooked, and this is the step most likely to be cut short.
- The hinge: the eggTake the pan off the heat before the beaten egg goes in, and stir it in fast so it disperses rather than lands in one place. Returning it to the fire "until the egg is set" means low heat and constant stirring until the mixture thickens and coats a spoon, roughly 170-175F. Any real boil after this point scrambles it.
- "1 teaspoon of butter"A teaspoon of butter in a cup of filling is for gloss, not richness. The recipe adds it off the fire along with the beaten egg, before the pan goes back on the heat; stir until it disappears.
- Cool before spreadingThe filling is thin while hot and sets as it cools. Chill it to room temperature or colder or it will run out from between the layers.
- The second half is an icing2 cups confectioners' sugar creamed with 1/2 cup (1 stick) softened butter is a plain American buttercream. It will take a tablespoon of orange juice or cream to become spreadable; "cream until light" assumes several minutes of beating, which is fast work with a stand mixer.
- YieldRoughly 1 to 1 1/4 cups of filling and roughly 1 1/2 cups of icing, in the region of what a two-layer 8- or 9-inch cake takes.
Orange filling belongs to the era of the layer cake, which spread in American kitchens as chemical leavening and more controllable ranges made it easier to bake thin, even rounds instead of one tall loaf. Community and commercial cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries carry many cooked fillings on the same pattern: fruit juice or milk, sugar, a spoonful or two of flour or cornstarch, an egg, a knob of butter, cooked into a curd-like paste. The flour-thickened version was the thriftier one, using a single egg where a true orange curd would want several yolks. The unlabeled block of creamed butter and confectioners' sugar at the end is unexplained; in books assembled from contributed recipes, an omission of this kind is common enough, though nothing here tells us why this particular cook left it unmarked.