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Orange Puffs
Grate the rind of three oranges and strain their juice, put the rinds into a mortar with one pound of sugar and about three ounces of butter and pound them into a smooth paste, then mix in the strained juice. Roll the paste out on a marble slab and cut into rounds with a tin cutter. Lay them a short distance from each other on baking sheets over which has been spread a sheet of white paper and bake in a rather slow oven. When done pile the puffs on a dish over which has been spread a folded napkin or an ornamental dish-paper, dust them over, with sugar, and serve.
A short, unusually terse formula even by the standards of this book: read it through before starting, because as printed the paste will not behave the way the instructions assume.
- The paste is incomplete as writtenSugar, butter, grated rind and orange juice will not form a mixture you can roll on marble and cut with a tin cutter; as printed it will be a thick wet syrup. Other recipes under this name bind the pounded rind with egg or a little flour, or cook rind and sugar down to a stiff candied paste first. Expect to supply some such step yourself; the printed text seems to assume a cook who already knew it.
- "Rather slow oven"About 275-300F. These are meant to dry and set rather than brown, and a hotter oven will caramelise the sugar and spread them into a single sheet.
- WeightsOne pound of sugar is about 2 1/4 cups; three ounces of butter is 6 tablespoons. The rind of three oranges is roughly 3 tablespoons packed, and their strained juice about 3/4 to 1 cup — far more liquid than the sugar and butter can carry, which is another sign a binder or a reduction is missing.
- Mortar workThe pounding is not decorative. It bruises the oil out of the zest into the sugar, which is where the flavour comes from. A food processor does the same job in under a minute; pulse the rind with the sugar before adding butter.
- Grate the rind firstZest the oranges before juicing them. Take only the coloured outer layer — the white pith underneath is bitter and will not soften in a slow oven.
- "A sheet of white paper"Parchment. Nineteenth-century kitchens used plain writing or kitchen paper for exactly this purpose; modern printed or recycled paper is not a substitute.
- Marble slabMarble was used because it stays cold and keeps butter firm. A chilled sheet pan or a cold countertop works; chill the paste well before rolling either way.
- Yield and servingSmall rounds of about 1 1/2 inches from this quantity give roughly three dozen. They are a dessert or tea sweet, served piled on a napkin-lined dish and dusted with sugar, and they soften quickly in humid air — keep them airtight.
Orange puffs belong to a long line of English confectionery in which candied citrus peel was pounded with sugar into a paste, then, by most accounts, dried in the cooling bread oven; recipes under that name appear in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century household books, often said to be bound with egg or a spoonful of flour. By the time Oscar Tschirky compiled his 1896 Cook Book at the Waldorf, such items had arguably become more a small part of a professional pastry department's repertoire than a housewife's project, and the compressed, assume-everything phrasing here may reflect that — the book was assembled from a working hotel kitchen and seems often to record what a trained cook needed reminding of, not what a beginner needed taught. The instruction to serve the puffs piled on a folded napkin or an ornamental dish-paper reads as characteristic of Gilded Age hotel service, where the presentation of a plate of dry sweets was as codified as the recipe itself.