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Orange Trifle
1 cup sugar 1 cup orange juice Grated rind 1 orange 1 tablespoon lemon juice Whip from 3½ cups cream Make same as Charlotte Russe, and mould; or make orange jelly, color with fruit red, and cover bottom of mould one-half inch deep; chill, and when firm fill with Orange Trifle mixture. Cool remaining jelly in shallow pan, cut in cubes, and garnish base of mould. 1/2 box gelatine or
The ingredient list has been mangled in setting — the gelatine that makes the whole thing work has been stranded at the bottom of the page. Read it as a moulded Bavarian cream rather than an English trifle: no sponge cake, no custard, just orange, cream and gelatine.
- Read the ingredients in orderThe list should begin with the gelatine: ½ box gelatine, 1 cup sugar, 1 cup orange juice, grated rind of 1 orange, 1 tablespoon lemon juice, whip from 3½ cups cream. The trailing line is a stray fragment of the ingredient list, not a second stage; it breaks off at "or", so an alternative measure for the gelatine has been lost with it.
- Half a box of gelatineBox sizes varied by brand and period, so this is not an exact figure. The usual reading for recipes of this date is about 2 tablespoons of granulated gelatine, i.e. 2 modern ¼-ounce envelopes, which is the safe amount for 1 cup of juice plus the whipped cream.
- "Whip from 3½ cups cream"The period method was to beat cream in a chilled bowl and skim off the stiff froth as it rose, returning the unwhipped liquid to be beaten again, so a large quantity of cream yielded a much smaller volume of whip. Modern heavy cream whips completely, so roughly 1 to 1½ cups will give you the couple of cups of firm whip the mixture needs, without the skimming.
- Make same as Charlotte RusseThe cross-reference sends you back to the book's own method. In outline: soak the gelatine in cold water, dissolve it with the sugar in a little heated orange juice, add the remaining juice, rind and lemon juice, then chill the mixture over ice water until it is syrupy and just beginning to thicken at the edges. No quantity of soaking water is given in the recipe as printed.
- The hingeFold the cream in at that syrupy stage and no other. Still-warm gelatine melts the whip and the dessert separates into a cream layer over a jelly layer; fully set gelatine breaks into lumps that never smooth out.
- AcidA full cup of citrus juice plus lemon is a lot of acid for gelatine, which slackens the set. Do not cut the gelatine, and give the mould a good six hours in the refrigerator, overnight if you can.
- Fruit redThe colouring for the optional jelly lining was a commercial red food colouring of the period. Any red food colouring does the same job, and the jelly itself is the book's separate orange jelly recipe — gelatine, sugar, orange and lemon juice, no cream.
- Unmoulding and yieldUnmoulding -- Dip the mould briefly in warm water, loosen the edge with a thin knife and invert onto a chilled platter. The finished mixture comes to something over a quart, more with the jelly lining, so use a mould at least that size.
An English trifle means sponge cake soaked in wine under custard and cream, but American cookbooks of this period used "trifle" loosely for rich cold cream desserts, and this one is really a Bavarian cream — fruit juice, sugar and whipped cream held together with gelatine. Two developments stand behind it: granulated gelatine sold in boxed papers, which needed only soaking rather than the long boiling-down of calves' feet, and winter oranges arriving by rail from Florida and California in quantities that made a full cup of fresh juice an unremarkable thing to call for. The instruction to "make same as Charlotte Russe" is characteristic of the book's method, which teaches a technique once and then cross-refers to it, expecting the cook to turn back a page.