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Orange Custard
Arrange slices of sweet oranges in glass dish, pour over them Boiled Custard; chill, and cover with Meringue I.
This is an assembly recipe: it assumes you already have Boiled Custard and Meringue I from elsewhere in the book. Everything that can go wrong is in those two components.
- The custard is the hingeBoiled Custard in this book is a stirred custard, not a baked one: scalded milk, egg yolks and sugar cooked over hot water only until it coats the spoon, which modern practice puts at roughly 170-175F. If it reaches a simmer it curdles; straining may rescue it, but the texture will not fully recover.
- Meringue IStiffly beaten egg whites sweetened with powdered sugar; check the book's own proportions rather than relying on a remembered figure. It goes on uncooked here. If that concerns you, use pasteurized whites, or brown the top briefly under a hot broiler and serve at once.
- Preparing the orangesPeel, remove all white pith, and slice crosswise or cut into segments free of membrane. Pith turns bitter as it sits in custard.
- Drain the juiceLet the cut fruit sit in a sieve for a few minutes. Free orange juice thins the custard and its acid can make it look broken at the edges.
- ChillingTwo hours in the refrigerator is enough to get the dish thoroughly cold; the custard stays a soft sauce around the fruit rather than setting. Add the meringue just before serving; it weeps if it stands on a cold custard for long.
- The dishA glass bowl is specified for a reason -- the point is the visible layering of fruit, pale custard and white meringue. Individual glasses work as well and are easier to serve.
This belongs to the long English tradition of trifles and "floating" custards that American cookbooks drew on, where fruit, a stirred custard and a froth of beaten whites are layered in clear glass so the arrangement itself is the ornament. The recipe carries no attribution, though the numbering of its components suggests a late nineteenth-century cooking-school manual, and it can be read against the way oranges had changed by the end of that century: Florida and California fruit moving by rail made sweet eating oranges a reliable winter item in northern cities, and cookbooks of the period are often said to have put them into custards, jellies and charlottes with new confidence. The recipe's brevity is also characteristic of such books' method -- the reader is expected to have mastered Boiled Custard and Meringue I as separate lessons, then combine them, which is very much the Boston Cooking School's classroom approach set down on the page.