Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Orange Baskets
Orange Baskets
Select some oranges with a clear skin, and, with a blunt knife, mark out the handle and rim of the baskets in vandykes. With a sharp knife cut through the rind over the traced lines, taking care not to cut through the pulp. Take off the two spare pieces of peel, and, with the handle of a teaspoon, carefully take out all the pulp from the basket. Fill up the baskets with orange jelly or whipped cream, and decorate with crystalized flowers; put a large flat of sponge-cake in the center of a dish that has had a napkin spread over it, put one basket on top of the cake, and surround with the remainder. Any form of extra ornamentations can be put in the basket.
This is a presentation piece rather than a cooked dish: the work is all in the carving and the filling is made separately. Read it as a technique for hollowing citrus into a handled basket.
- VandykesA vandyke is the zigzag or sawtooth edge familiar from 17th-century lace collars. You are scoring a band across the top of the orange for the handle and a zigzag line around the circumference for the rim.
- The cut that mattersScore only through the rind, not into the flesh. If the knife breaks into the segments, juice weeps into the cut and the handle loses its strength once the pulp is removed.
- Choose the fruit for the shellThick-skinned navels carve far better than thin-skinned juicing oranges. A slice off the base, barely into the pith, makes the basket sit level without leaking.
- Orange jellyA sweetened, strained gelatin. The recipe does not say what becomes of the scooped pulp, though its juice is the obvious base. Fresh pineapple, kiwi or papaya in the mix will prevent gelatin setting; canned versions are fine.
- Crystalized flowersViolets, rose petals, borage and primroses, brushed with egg white and dusted with fine sugar. Use only untreated edible blooms grown for eating, never florists' flowers, which are routinely sprayed.
- A large flat of sponge-cakeA single wide, shallow round of sponge, used as a plinth. The recipe gives no size; it needs only to be broad enough to take one basket on top with the rest set around it.
- The napkinA folded linen napkin laid over the serving dish was conventional in period service, and it also helps keep the baskets from sliding. A doily or a shallow bed of leaves does the same job.
- Timing and yieldThe recipe gives no yield; make as many baskets as will surround the cake on the dish. The shells can be carved several hours ahead and kept covered and chilled; fill with jelly the same day and with whipped cream shortly before serving.
Hollowed and carved citrus was a staple of the Victorian and Edwardian dessert table, where a course was judged as much on architecture as on flavour: jellies in moulds, spun sugar, cakes built into plinths. Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896 by the maitre d'hotel of the original Waldorf on Fifth Avenue, sits squarely in that tradition, and this entry is less a recipe than a set of instructions for a table centrepiece that could be assembled from things the pastry department already had on hand. The vandyke edge, generally traced to the pointed lace collars painted by Anthony van Dyck, was standard confectioners' vocabulary by the 1890s and turns up on everything from ham frills to pie crusts. Crystallized violets, which the recipe calls for as decoration, were then a commercial product.