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Frosted Oranges
Make plain white icing and use it to dip orange slices in just when it has become too thick with beating not to run off, and yet thin enough to settle to smoothness. Have a long splinter or skewer ready for each one. Stick the point of a skewer into the edge of the orange section, dip into the frosting, push the other end of the skewer into a bowl of salt, and let the pieces hang over the edge of the bowl in a warm place to dry.
A confectioner's trick rather than a baked good: peeled orange sections dipped in icing and hung to set. The whole thing turns on the icing being at exactly the right consistency, and on the fruit being dry.
- Dry the fruit firstThis is the hinge. Peel the oranges, separate the sections, strip away all pith and loose membrane, and leave them on a rack or paper for an hour or more until the surfaces are tacky rather than wet. Icing slides straight off a juicy section and will never set.
- What "plain white icing" meantIn American pastry books of this period the phrase generally means confectioners' sugar beaten with egg white and a little lemon juice — royal icing — or the same sugar beaten with water; the recipe itself does not specify. Either works here; the sugar-and-water version is the simpler choice and avoids the raw-egg question entirely. If you want the harder, glossier shell of royal icing, use pasteurized egg white.
- The consistency described"Too thick with beating not to run off, and yet thin enough to settle to smoothness" is a real test, not a figure of speech. Lift the spoon: a ribbon should fall back and disappear into the surface in about five to ten seconds. Thinner and it drains off the fruit; thicker and it sets in ridges.
- The bowl of saltThe salt appears to serve as a heavy, dense medium that grips a skewer upright — sand or dry rice would do the same job, and a block of florist's foam does it better. Any of these lets the coated sections hang clear of one another while the icing sets.
- SkewersThe recipe calls for a long splinter or skewer, long enough to rest across the bowl with the fruit hanging clear of the rim; bamboo skewers work, pushed into the thick edge of each section where the membrane is toughest. The point will leave a small hole; turn it to the back when you plate them.
- "A warm place to dry"Somewhere dry and gently warm, well short of hot. An oven with only the pilot or the light on works; so does a fan set on low across the tray. Sugar-water icing may take an hour or two, royal icing longer. Humid weather can double it.
- Eat them the same dayCitrus weeps. Within twenty-four hours juice begins to bleed through and the shell goes cloudy and soft, so make these the afternoon you intend to serve them. They are a garnish or a petit four, not a keeping sweet.
- YieldOne large navel orange gives ten to twelve usable sections; a cup of confectioners' sugar beaten to a dipping icing will coat roughly three oranges' worth.
Frosted or "iced" fruit belongs to the long tradition of the confectioner's dessert table, where the point was ornament as much as eating — sugar-shelled grapes, crystallized violets, glacé cherries and candied peel arranged in tiers or scattered over a cake. The technique here is a plain-sugar cousin of the older and more dangerous glacé work, in which fruit was dipped in boiling sugar syrup taken to the hard-crack stage; icing gives a similar white shell with none of the risk of a scalding. Oranges appear often in American pastry books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The improvised rig of skewers stuck into a bowl of salt is characteristic of the genre: a cook was expected to build the drying rack out of whatever was on the bench.