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Cream with Orange
Place the thinly-pared rind of an orange in a saucepan with one pint of milk and set it over the fire until it boils, then move it to the side and let it simmer for ten minutes. Put five tablespoonfuls of caster-sugar in a basin with the yolks of four or five eggs and beat them well; then, while still beating, pour in gradually the boiling milk. Strain the whole through a fine hair-sieve, fill small cups with it and stand them in a pan with boiling water to three-fourths their height. Remove the cups from the water, leave them until slightly cooled, then stand them on ice until wanted for serving.
A pot de crème in all but name, and the instruction that matters most is missing from the original: the filled cups have to actually cook in that water bath before they are pulled out and chilled. Everything else is straightforward.
- The missing stepAs written, the cups go into boiling water and are then removed with no cooking time given. The custard needs to set in the water bath — the recipe implies a stovetop pan of hot water, held just below a simmer — until the centre wobbles as a single mass; for small cups expect roughly half an hour. Custards of this kind set at around 170-180F internal and are apt to curdle and weep if pushed much beyond that. The recipe itself supplies neither an oven nor a temperature.
- Caster sugarSuperfine sugar, sold as such or made by pulsing granulated sugar in a food processor for a few seconds. Ordinary granulated works here since the sugar dissolves in hot milk anyway.
- The orange rindPare it with a vegetable peeler in wide strips and take no white pith, which turns the custard bitter over a ten-minute steep. The oils in the zest are the whole point of the dish; bottled orange extract is a poor substitute.
- Pint of milkA US pint is 16 fl oz, 2 cups. Whole milk gives a lean, clean-set custard; replacing a third of it with cream produces a richer result, though the recipe as written calls for milk alone.
- TemperingPouring the boiling milk into the yolks gradually while beating is not optional fussiness — dumped in at once, the yolks scramble. Add the first cup in a thin stream.
- Hair sieveA fine horsehair sieve; any fine-mesh strainer does the same job. Straining removes the chalazae and any set egg, and it is what separates a silky custard from a grainy one.
- Stand them on iceThe period instruction for refrigeration. Cool the cups to room temperature, then chill at least two hours; the custard firms considerably as it cools.
- YieldAbout 4 to 5 small cups of roughly 4 fl oz each; the choice between four and five yolks makes little difference to the volume.
Custards flavoured by steeping citrus peel in hot milk are far older than the Waldorf, running back through eighteenth-century English "lemon creams" and French petits pots de crème, and the method survives because it works: the aromatic oils in the peel are fat-soluble and migrate readily into warm milk in a way that juice, which would curdle the dairy, cannot match. Oscar Tschirky's book, compiled around the turn of the twentieth century from the kitchens of the Waldorf-Astoria, is full of these small moulded and cupped desserts — they could be prepared hours ahead, held on ice, and sent out to a large dining room at speed, which mattered more to a hotel than to a home cook. The terse, half-finished quality of the instructions here is characteristic of the volume, which leaves much of the obvious business — that a cup of custard standing in hot water is meant to cook — unsaid.