No. 3690

Stewed Oranges and Orange Salads

Compote d'Oranges et Salade d'Orange

Cut each of four or five good oranges into six parts; pare them to the pulp, suppressing the peels and white skin, then extract the seeds. Put the oranges into a bowl and pour over a few spoonfuls of thirty-degree cold syrup flavored with orange peel and a little kirsch; half an hour after dress the fruits with the syrup poured over.

Orange Salad.—Select sweet, juicy oranges, peel them to the pulp, cut in crosswise slices, and range them in a circle in a dish; bestrew with sugar and pour rum over.

Orange and Apple Salad.—Peel some fine, sound apples, core and cut them up into thin slices, dress them in a circle on a dish with slices of orange between each piece of apple, throw powdered sugar over, and pour on some kirsch and rum.

← No. 3689 Stewed Chestnuts Preserves & Conserves No. 3691 Stewed Peaches or Apricots →

For the Modern Kitchen

Three uncooked orange preparations from Ranhofer's compote chapter. Nothing here is stewed in the modern sense; the work is all in the knife and the syrup.

Thirty-degree syrupRanhofer gives syrup densities in degrees, read with a saccharometer on the Baume scale. Thirty degrees is a heavy syrup of roughly 55 to 57 percent sugar by weight -- closer to four parts sugar to three parts water than to two parts to one. Boil it just until clear, steep strips of orange zest in it, then chill completely before it touches the fruit.
"Pare them to the pulp"This is the hinge. Cut away peel, pith and the membrane over each segment so only glistening flesh remains, working over a bowl to catch juice. Any white left behind turns bitter under sugar and syrup.
Kirsch and rum quantitiesThe original gives none. A tablespoon of kirsch to a cup of syrup is enough to perfume it; for the salads, two to three tablespoons of rum over four oranges. Both are meant as scent, not as a soak.
Cut each into six partsThe order of the instructions suggests dividing the whole orange lengthwise into six wedges and then paring each. Modern cooks may find it easier to segment the fruit, which gives much the same result.
The half hour mattersThe half hour -- half an hour of maceration in the cold syrup is what the recipe allows. Much longer and the segments are likely to slacken and weep, thinning the syrup into juice.
Apples and browningSlice the apples last and dress them immediately; the citrus juice and sugar slow oxidation but will not stop it. A firm, tart eating apple holds its shape better than a mealy one.
Sugar for the salads"Powdered sugar" in this book is fine granulated or caster sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioner's sugar sold under that name today.
YieldFour or five oranges serve four as a light dessert course. The apple version, with two apples added, stretches to six.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's summary of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its numbered entries were written for cooks who already knew the trade -- which is why a phrase like "thirty-degree cold syrup" passes without explanation. Compotes of fruit in flavored syrup sit in the same chapter as preserves, and by the 1890s Florida and Mediterranean oranges arrived in Eastern cities in quantity. The three variations are the compote in flavored syrup, the sliced salade d'orange with rum, and the apple version. Kirsch and rum in fruit desserts is standard nineteenth-century French practice, the spirit doing the work that vanilla extract or a liqueur glaze might do now.