Home › Puddings And Sauces › Orange Pudding
Orange Pudding
Two large oranges pared and cut in pieces one inch square, put in bottom of pudding dish, pour over them one cup white sugar, then make a plain corn starch pudding without sugar, and pour it over the orange and sugar. Let stand and cool.
A late-nineteenth-century orange trifle in its simplest form: raw fruit macerating in sugar under a blanket of hot cornstarch blancmange. The recipe assumes you already know how to make the pudding part, which is the only real gap.
- The missing pudding recipe"A plain corn starch pudding" of this period is typically something like 3 tablespoons cornstarch slaked in a little cold milk, stirred into 1 pint scalded milk with a pinch of salt and cooked until it thickens and loses its raw starch taste — two to three minutes at a bare simmer. Sugar is omitted here because the cup of sugar over the oranges sweetens the whole dish.
- Pour it on hotThe hinge is temperature: the cornstarch must go over the fruit while still hot and pourable so it sets in place and seals the oranges in their syrup. Cooled cornstarch pudding will not spread and will break into curds when you push it about.
- Pare means pith too"Pared" here most likely means removing the peel and the white pith, not just the zest. Pith left on can turn bitter as the fruit stands in sugar.
- Sugar quantityOne cup of sugar to two oranges is very sweet by current taste, and its job is partly to draw juice out of the fruit. Half a cup does the same work if you are not aiming for a period-accurate result.
- Cornstarch, not custardNineteenth-century "corn starch pudding" is thickened by starch alone; there is no egg and no baking. It is a stovetop blancmange, so it will set firm and slightly opaque rather than wobble like a custard.
- Cooling and standing"Let stand and cool" suggests at least a few hours, so the fruit gives up its juice and the starch sets. Cover the surface to stop a skin forming, or accept the skin as period detail.
- YieldThe recipe states no yield; two oranges and a pint or so of pudding will serve about four. Best eaten within a day, as the fruit juice weeps and thins the pudding from below.
Cornstarch pudding was a product of the American corn-refining industry that expanded rapidly after mid-century, when boxed cornstarch became a cheap pantry staple. Cookbooks of the 1880s, The Dixie Cook Book — a compiled commercial volume — among them, are full of such puddings because they were fast, needed no oven, and used no eggs. Layering them over sugared fruit turned a plain starch pudding into something closer to a company dessert, and oranges were shipped up from Florida and the Gulf in growing quantity by rail in this period.