Home › Recipes › Orange Syrup Sauce
Orange Syrup Sauce
2 pounds of sugar. 2 oranges. 1 lemon. 1 1/2 cups of water. Make same as lemon syrup.
The sauce preceding mixed with one third curacao is the proper sauce for Savarin pudding, to be poured into the pudding or cake hot.
A heavy orange syrup, thinned with liqueur, meant to be poured hot over a savarin. The instruction "make same as lemon syrup" assumes you have read the preceding page: pare the zest thinly, add it with the strained juice to the sugar and water, dissolve, boil briefly, then strain.
- The ratio is deliberately heavyTwo pounds of sugar to 1 1/2 cups of water is roughly a 2 1/2:1 syrup by weight, well past the usual 1:1 simple syrup. Presumably it is meant to soak into an open, dry yeast cake without turning it to mush, so do not thin it with extra water.
- Dissolve before you boilWith that little water, undissolved crystals on the pan sides will seed the whole batch and it will set grainy. Stir over low heat until the syrup is clear, wash the sides down with a wet brush, then stop stirring once it boils.
- Zest, then juiceTake the orange and lemon peel off in wide strips with no white pith and infuse it in the syrup. The lemon-syrup method boils the strained juice in with the sugar and water; if you prefer a fresher flavour you can depart from it and add the juice off the heat at the end.
- CuracaoAn orange liqueur flavoured with bitter orange peel, sweet but with a bitter edge. 'One third' most likely means one part liqueur to two parts syrup by volume; add it off the fire. Cointreau or a good triple sec stands in; Grand Marnier is brandy-based and heavier.
- Pouring hot into the cakeThe recipe specifies the sauce go in hot. Ladle it on in stages and let each addition soak in before the next; a savarin can absorb an astonishing amount.
- Yield and keepingSomething closer to 4 cups of finished syrup before the curacao goes in, enough for a large savarin or two small ones. The plain syrup keeps for weeks refrigerated in a clean jar; mix in the curacao only as you serve.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the run of late nineteenth-century American trade manuals written for hotel and restaurant bakeshops rather than home kitchens, which is why the entry is so terse: it assumes a cook who already knows the lemon syrup on the page before and needs only the variation. The dish it dresses, the savarin, is a ring of rich yeast dough soaked in syrup and spirits, a French pastry conventionally credited to the Julien brothers of Paris in the 1840s and named in honour of the gastronomic writer Brillat-Savarin; it is the same family as the rum baba. Curacao takes its name from the Caribbean island, where the dried peel of a bitter local orange descended from Seville stock was distilled into liqueur, and by the 1890s it was a familiar bottle on American pastry benches for exactly this purpose, since an orange syrup alone lacks the edge that keeps a very sweet cake from cloying.