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Orange Hard Sauce
Select a thin orange, cut the skin into six equal parts, by cutting through the skin at the stem end and passing the knife around the orange to nearly the blossom end; loosen and turn each piece down and remove the orange. Extract juice and mix it with yellow sugar (prepared by dropping a drop or two of "gold coloring" on white sugar while stirring it) till a ball can be formed, which place inside the orange-peel and serve. The "gold coloring" may be omitted. Lemon sauce may be made in the same way.
A hard sauce in name only — there is no butter here, just orange juice worked into sugar until it holds a ball, served inside the hollowed peel with the rind cut into petals. The whole thing hinges on how little liquid you use.
- Proportions, since none are givenStart with about a cup of confectioners' or superfine sugar and add the juice a scant teaspoon at a time, stirring hard. Two to three teaspoons is usually enough to bring it together; a tablespoon will slump into a glaze.
- Sugar choiceNineteenth-century "white sugar" for sauces was often rolled and sifted fine. Confectioners' sugar makes a smooth, cohesive ball; granulated stays gritty and will not hold shape without more juice than the sauce can carry.
- "Yellow sugar" and gold coloringThis is cosmetic tinting, not brown or raw sugar. The quotation marks suggest "gold coloring" was a proprietary product of some kind, presumably a confectioner's colouring; the recipe itself says it may be omitted, and a little finely grated orange zest gives colour and more flavour.
- Cutting the peelScore through the skin only, from the stem end nearly to the blossom end, so the six strips stay joined at the bottom. Turn them down like petals and lift the segments out whole — a grapefruit spoon works better than a knife.
- Choose the fruit for its skin"A thin orange" means thin-skinned and firm, so the petals curl neatly rather than cracking. Navel oranges peel too thickly; a Valencia or a small juice orange is closer to what was meant.
- Zest before you juiceTake the zest off the loosened strips before turning them down if you want to add it to the sugar. Once the peel is shaped and filled it is awkward to work on.
- Yield and servingOne orange fills one shell and serves two, perhaps three, alongside a steamed or boiled pudding. Assemble shortly before serving — the sugar draws moisture and the ball softens within an hour or so.
- The lemon versionLemon juice is sharper, so you may want less of it for flavour's sake; the quantity needed to bind the sugar is much the same. Expect a more assertive sauce, better against a plain suet or bread pudding.
Hard sauce — the butter-and-sugar paste eaten with plum pudding, whose brandy-flavoured version is known in Britain as brandy butter — was a fixture of American dessert tables by the 1880s, and cookbooks of the period print a long run of variations named for whatever flavoured them: brandy, wine, vanilla, orange, lemon. This one drops the butter entirely and relies on juice alone to bind the sugar, which puts it closer to a stiff icing than to a true hard sauce, and its appeal is plainly the presentation: the fruit's own peel cut into petals and used as the serving dish. That kind of table showmanship, cheap in ingredients but costly in a cook's time, is characteristic of late nineteenth-century household manuals like The Dixie Cook Book (first published in 1883), which seem to have been aimed at a reader with some help in the kitchen and guests to impress. The instruction about "gold coloring" is a small window on the era's enthusiasm for commercial food dyes, sold to home cooks before federal regulation, and the author's offhand note that it may be omitted suggests not everyone was persuaded.