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Florida Conserve of Oranges
For darioles, mountain cakes, eclairs aux confitures, tartelettes a l' orange, etc. 1 pound of sugar. 4 large oranges. 2 or 3 lemons--juice only. 4 ounces of butter. 6 yolks and 2 whole eggs. 1 teaspoonful of extract of rose Put the sugar and butter in a bright saucepan; grate in the yellow rinds of the oranges and add an ounce of candied orange flowers, if you have them. Squeeze in the juice of the oranges and lemons without the seeds, and stir the syrup thus made over the fire till it boils. Beat the eggs and yolks a little, add them and let cook till the mixture becomes thick--about ten minutes. Add the rose extract after cooling.
An ancient, cheap, but laborious way of making a conserve of oranges or lemons, is to boil the rinds in two or three waters for several hours, to extract the bitter taste and make them tender; then pound them to a paste in a mortar and boil the paste with either honey or syrup. A large proportion of the area of the Bahama Islands is devoted to the cultivation of pineapples. The appearance of the broad expanse of young fruit with its clusters of delicately-tinted, but sharp and serrated leaves, rising only a short distance from the ground and covering the undulating fields, produces a very remarkable effect. As many as 1,500,000 of the fruit have been collected from a single acre
This is an orange curd in all but name, thickened with yolks and set by heat rather than by pectin. The instructions are workable as written; most of what needs translating is vessels, the rose flavouring, and how far to cook the eggs.
- "A bright saucepan"The phrase means a clean, well-scoured, unblackened metal pan; in a period kitchen that would most often have been tin-lined copper, valued because it heated evenly and let you see the colour of the syrup. Use a heavy stainless or enamelled pan — bare copper or aluminium reacts with this much citrus juice and can turn the conserve grey and metallic.
- Do not let it boil after the eggs go inThe hinge of the recipe. The syrup boils, but once the yolks are added the mixture must stay below a simmer or it will scramble. Cook over low heat or a water bath, stirring constantly, to about 170–175°F, which is roughly the ten minutes given.
- Extract of rosePeriod "extract of rose" could be an alcoholic tincture or something closer to rose water, and strengths varied. Modern rose extract is generally much stronger than modern rose water; start with a quarter teaspoon of extract, or up to a tablespoon of rose water, and taste. Add it after cooling, as the original says, since the aroma cooks off.
- Candied orange flowersSugared orange blossoms were sold by confectioners and are now a specialty item. Omit them, or substitute a few drops of orange flower water — the rose already carries the floral note.
- Zest and juiceGrate only the coloured outer rind; the white pith beneath is bitter. Four large oranges give roughly one to one and a half cups of juice and the two or three lemons another third to half a cup, so the acid balance is generous — taste before adding the third lemon.
- Strain and coolPass the finished conserve through a sieve to catch zest strands and any threads of set egg, then press a sheet of plastic or buttered paper on the surface so it does not skin.
- Yield and keepingRoughly three cups, enough to fill a couple of dozen small tartlets or éclairs. Being egg-based it is not a keeping preserve despite the name: refrigerate and use within a week.
- The pastries named at the topDarioles are small pastry-lined moulds with a rich filling; éclairs aux confitures are éclairs piped with fruit conserve instead of pastry cream; tartelettes à l'orange are small orange tarts. All want the conserve cold and firm before filling.
- The pineapple paragraphThe closing lines on the Bahamas are unrelated filler, not part of the method. The 1,500,000-per-acre figure is not credible as a count of fruit from a single acre.
What this book calls a conserve is what an English cook would have called orange cheese or orange curd — a butter-and-yolk citrus cream used as a filling rather than a spread, of a family with lemon cheese and "lemon butter." The label "Florida" is often taken to reflect a shift in supply: by the 1880s and 1890s Florida groves, tied to Northern cities by rail and steamer, are said to have made oranges cheap enough for a working pastry kitchen to buy them by the dozen, though the picture is complicated by the freezes of 1894–95. The second paragraph preserves the older, genuinely thrifty method, in which the boiled and pounded rinds — not the juice — were the substance of the preserve, sweetened with honey when sugar was dear; that technique is generally traced to the medieval kitchen and survives in marmalade and in candied peel. The rose flavouring belongs to the same older tradition, when rose and orange-flower waters were standard confectioner's perfumes, well before vanilla displaced them.