Orange Pie
Generally made with the object of using up a surplus of perishable fruit. Peel half the number of oranges required. With a very sharp knife slice them across the core, throw out the seeds, lay the slices over the bottoms of paste-lined pie pans alternately with slices of unpeeled oranges. Strew sugar over and pour over that a cooking-spoonful of red wine. Bake slowly till the juice is become thick syrup.
Cocoanut and lemon juice may be mixed with or strewn over the above. Orange pies can be made by the lemon pie receip's and with part lemons.
A bakery formula rather than a household one: quantities are left to the baker, and the whole point is turning oranges that will not keep into something saleable. A few things need translating before it works in a modern kitchen.
- The hinge: slow and long"Bake slowly till the juice is become thick syrup" is the entire instruction. The book gives no temperature or time; in a modern oven something in the region of 300-325F, and an hour or more, is a reasonable reading -- go by the liquid around the fruit being visibly syrupy rather than watery. Rushed at a higher heat the fruit stays raw-tasting and the filling floods the crust.
- Unpeeled slicesHalf the oranges go in with their skins on, which supplies the marmalade bitterness that makes this more than a sugar pie. Modern navels have thick, spongy, aggressively bitter pith; use thin-skinned juice oranges, Valencias or blood oranges, and slice them as near paper-thin as your knife allows.
- "A cooking-spoonful"An unstandardised measure; roughly a large spoonful, and 1 to 2 tablespoons of red wine per pie is one sensible reading, though a cooking spoon may well have held more.
- Sugar is unmeasuredStrewing over is an eye judgement. For a 9-inch pie start at about 3/4 cup, more if the oranges are sharp or a good deal of peel is going in, since the sugar also has to make the syrup.
- SeedsThe instruction to throw out the seeds reflects the fruit of the period. Many oranges sold now, navels especially, are seedless, but the thin-skinned varieties suggested above often are not, so check the peel-on slices: a bitten pip will spoil the mouthful.
- CocoanutDried shredded coconut. If you use the sweetened bagged sort, cut the sugar accordingly.
- The crustA single bottom crust in a paste-lined tin, left open. Given the long wet bake, blind-bake the shell to set it before filling, or expect a soft base.
- YieldOne 9-inch pie needs roughly 4 medium oranges, two peeled and two not; it cuts into six or eight. It is best served the day it is baked, before the juice slackens again.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the world of hotel and commercial bakeshops of the late nineteenth century, where recipes were written for men working through whatever the storeroom held, and this one says so outright: it exists "with the object of using up a surplus of perishable fruit." Citrus arrived in quantity and out of season by rail, and a crate going soft was a loss unless it could be baked into something. The trick of leaving half the fruit unpeeled is essentially marmalade logic transferred to a pie shell, relying on long slow cooking to tame the rind and turn the released juice to syrup. The closing line, that orange pies may equally be made by the lemon pie receipts, is characteristic of the genre: these books assumed a working pastry cook who knew the base formulas by heart and needed only the variation.