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Orange Fool
1019. Mix the juice of three Seville oranges, three eggs well beaten, a pint of cream, a little nutmeg and cinnamon, and sweeten to the taste. Set the whole over a slow fire, and stir it till it becomes as thick as good melted butter, but it must not be boiled; then pour it into a dish, and set it by till cold.
This is an older kind of fool: not fruit crushed into whipped cream, but a stirred custard set in a dish and eaten cold. Everything depends on holding the pan below a simmer.
- The hinge: never let it boilCook over a bain-marie or the lowest possible heat, stirring constantly, until the custard coats a spoon thickly — around 175-180F. A few seconds of boiling will scramble the eggs and no amount of beating will bring it back.
- "As thick as good melted butter"In this period "melted butter" meant the flour-and-butter sauce served with fish and puddings, not clarified butter. Aim for a thick pouring consistency, like a heavy pouring custard.
- Seville orangesThese are bitter marmalade oranges, in season only for a few weeks in midwinter. Three yield somewhere between 1/2 and 3/4 cup of very sharp juice; a workable stand-in is two parts ordinary orange juice to one part lemon, though the result is sweeter and less aromatic.
- Adding the acidCitrus juice and cream will curdle if the mixture gets too hot. Temper the beaten eggs and juice with a little warm cream first, or hold back the juice and stir it in once the custard has thickened and been taken off the heat.
- A pint of creamIf the book is English, its pint is the imperial 20 fl oz — about 2 1/2 US cups. Single cream or half-and-half gives a texture close to the original; heavy cream makes it noticeably richer and thicker.
- SweeteningThe recipe only says "sweeten to the taste". Start with 4 tablespoons of sugar for this volume, dissolve it in the cream, and taste before the custard sets, since it will read as less sweet when cold.
- SpicingGrate the nutmeg fresh and use ground cinnamon sparingly — perhaps 1/4 teaspoon of each — or infuse a cinnamon stick in the warming cream and lift it out before the eggs go in.
- Setting and yieldPour into a shallow dish or individual glasses and chill at least three hours; it thickens further as it cools. This makes four to six servings.
An English "fool" originally meant any soft, sweet, trifling dish of cream — the name is generally traced to the sense of something frivolous, and the older etymologies linking it to French fouler are not well supported. Early fools of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were often stirred custards like this one rather than the modern purée-and-whipped-cream affair, and orange, gooseberry and Norfolk (plain cream) fools all appear in receipt books of the period. The choice of Seville oranges is telling: bitter oranges reached British kitchens through the winter Iberian trade and were valued precisely for the sourness that made them poor dessert fruit but ideal for marmalade, sauces and sharp creams. A compendium of this kind preserved the dish largely as inherited household tradition, at a point when sweet oranges were becoming cheaper and the bitter kind was retreating to the marmalade pot.