Home › Cake Fillings and Frostings › Orange Filling
Orange Filling
Two oranges (grated rind of one); two tablespoons of cold water; one dessert spoon of cornstarch; onehalf cup of sugar; one egg. Place the cornstarch in one-half the water, and when it is dissolved, add the beaten yolk of the egg, and stir until smooth. Place the rest of the water, the juice of the oranges and the grated rind of one of them, on the fire, and when the liquid boils, add the egg mixture. Cook two minutes, and add the slightly beaten white of the egg just before taking the filling from the fire. Cool partly before using.
A small stovetop orange curd thickened with cornstarch rather than butter and yolks alone. The whole thing takes about five minutes, and the only real hazard is scrambling the egg.
- Dessert spoonA dessert spoon is two teaspoons, half a tablespoon. That is the reading to use here — a full tablespoon of cornstarch would set the filling to a paste.
- Why so little waterTwo tablespoons of water looks wrong until you notice the juice of two oranges is the real liquid, roughly a half to two-thirds of a cup. If your oranges give much more than that, hold some back or the filling will not thicken.
- The hinge: temper, do not dumpThe instruction to add the egg mixture to boiling liquid is workable only if you pour it in slowly while whisking hard. Adding it in one go gives you sweet orange soup with threads of cooked yolk through it.
- Two minutes means two minutes of visible boilCornstarch needs to reach a full bubble to thicken and to cook out its raw taste. Keep whisking; the mixture goes from thin to coating the back of a spoon quite suddenly.
- The whiteThe recipe adds it "just before taking the filling from the fire," so it gets only seconds in the hot mixture and sets only partly, which is what gives this filling its light body. If that concerns you, add the white with the yolk at the tempering stage instead and cook the whole thing the full two minutes.
- ZestGrate only the coloured outer layer of one orange; the white pith beneath is bitter. If you want a clear filling rather than a flecked one, strain the hot mixture before cooling.
- Cooling"Cool partly" means barely warm — spread hot and it runs out of the cake, spread cold and it drags the crumb. Press plastic wrap onto the surface to keep a skin from forming.
- YieldAbout a cup, enough for one layer of an 8- or 9-inch cake. Refrigerate leftovers and use within two days.
Cornstarch-thickened fruit fillings like this one belong to the turn-of-the-century American cake, where a plain white or sponge layer was expected to be built up with whatever was cheap and bright. Commercial cornstarch had been made in the United States since the mid-nineteenth century and by the 1900s was one of the common household thickeners for pie and cake fillings, alongside flour. The Butterick Cook Book (1911) came from a pattern and magazine publisher writing for women running households without staff, and its fillings-and-frostings chapter reflects that: quick stovetop preparations, small quantities, and citrus used for flavour at a time when Florida and California oranges were arriving by rail in winter and were still enough of a treat to justify their own recipe.