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Orange Float
One quart water, the juice and pulp of two lemons, one coffeecup sugar; when boiling, add four table-spoons corn starch, let boil fifteen minutes, stirring all the time; when cold pour it over four or five peeled and sliced oranges, and over the top spread the beaten whites of three eggs; sweeten and add a few drops of vanilla. Mrs. Wm. Skinner.
A late nineteenth-century "float" is a cornstarch-thickened lemon jelly poured over fruit and finished with a raw meringue. The base is sound cookery; the topping is the problem.
- The uncooked meringueThe beaten whites of three eggs are spread over a cold pudding and never heated at any point. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella Enteritidis within the intact egg, and nothing in this method reaches a temperature that would kill it. Use a current recipe if you want a floating meringue dessert.
- Why the old cooks got away with itWhy the old cooks may have got away with it -- Eggs in such households were often much fresher than a modern retail egg, and a dish like this would have been eaten soon after making; but we cannot know that from the receipt itself. Whatever the case then, the risk now falls hardest on the very young, the elderly, the pregnant and the immunocompromised.
- CoffeecupCup measures are not standardised in nineteenth-century American books; a coffeecup is usually reckoned at somewhere between three-quarters of a cup and a full cup. The sugar here is therefore a little under a cup.
- Cornstarch quantityFour tablespoons to a quart of water gives a soft, spoonable set rather than a sliceable mould. The recipe has it poured over the fruit when cold, so it must still be loose enough to pour.
- The fifteen-minute boilCornstarch reaches full thickening power within two or three minutes of the boil, so the fifteen minutes here is longer than the starch needs. Prolonged boiling in acid, from the lemon juice added at the start, will tend to thin the gel rather than strengthen it.
- YieldA quart of base over four or five oranges serves roughly six to eight.
"Float" was a general American name for a dessert in which something light rode on top of something soft: whipped cream, custard, or as here a raft of beaten white. It belongs to the same family as English floating island and the snow-topped puddings of mid-century receipt books, but the cornstarch base is consistent with the spread of commercial corn starch, which dates from the 1840s and came into household use gradually. Oranges in The Dixie Cook Book are at least suggestive of the Gulf and Florida trade, which by the 1880s was moving citrus north by rail in quantity, making a fruit that had been a Christmas luxury into something a Southern housekeeper could buy by the half dozen. Recipes signed with a contributor's name, as this one is for Mrs. Wm. Skinner, were the backbone of such compilations; they were gathered from subscribers and neighbours, and the measurements are given in whatever vessel happened to sit on the shelf.