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Orange Pudding (III)
Mrs. S. F. McMaster.
Peel and cut five good sweet juicy oranges into thin slices, taking out all the seeds; pour over them a coffee cup of white sugar. Let a pint of milk get boiling hot by setting in boiling water; add the yolks of three eggs well beaten, one tablespoon corn starch made smooth in a little cold milk; stir all the time, and as soon as thickened pour over the fruit. Beat the whites to a stiff froth; add a teaspoon sugar and spread it on for frosting; set it in the oven a few minutes to harden. Substitute any fruit if you prefer; peaches are nice done this way.
A cornstarch custard poured over sugared citrus and finished with meringue — essentially a Victorian orange trifle without the cake. Two things decide whether it works: the custard must be thick before it meets the fruit, and the fruit must be as dry of loose juice as you can manage.
- Coffee cup of sugarA coffee cup in this period is usually reckoned at roughly 1 cup, generally larger than a teacup. With sweet modern oranges, 3/4 cup is plenty; the sugar is there to draw juice as much as to sweeten.
- Setting in boiling waterThis is a double boiler instruction. Use a heatproof bowl over simmering water, or a heavy saucepan over low heat with constant stirring. Direct high heat will scramble the yolks before the cornstarch has a chance to set.
- Cornstarch and yolks togetherOne tablespoon of cornstarch to a pint of milk gives a pourable custard, not a set pudding. It needs to reach a full simmer for a moment for the starch to thicken and to lose its raw taste — but keep stirring, since yolks and starch together catch quickly.
- Curdling riskOrange juice and hot milk curdle on contact. Lift the orange slices out of the pooled syrup before you pour, or spoon the syrup off, and pour the hot custard over the fruit rather than stirring fruit into custard.
- Preparing the orangesFive sweet oranges means roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb. Navels and Cara Caras work; cut away all white pith, which turns bitter under sugar, and slice crosswise about 1/4 inch thick.
- The frostingA teaspoon of sugar to three whites is a very lean meringue by modern practice and is liable to weep. Two tablespoons per white gives something that holds. Spread it to touch the rim of the dish all round so it does not shrink back.
- "A few minutes" in the ovenBrowning a soft meringue takes 8-10 minutes at 350F, or 3-4 minutes at 425F if you want colour without warming the custard through. Watch it; there is no margin at the higher heat.
- Yield and servingFills a 1 1/2-quart dish and serves six. Best eaten the day it is made, cool rather than cold — refrigeration overnight loosens both the meringue and the starch-set custard.
- Substituting peachesPeaches carry far more free liquid than orange slices. Drain them well and expect a thinner result, or macerate them in the sugar for half an hour and discard the syrup.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in 1877 by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada," with proceeds going to the Hospital for Sick Children, and it is generally credited as the first Canadian fundraising cookbook of its kind — hence the parade of contributors' names, Mrs. S. F. McMaster among them, each vouching for her own dish. The cornstarch is a period marker. Commercial corn starch had been on the North American market since the 1840s and by the 1870s cookbooks reached for it constantly as a cheap, reliable thickener where an older receipt would have called for many more egg yolks or a flour-and-butter base. What results is a recognisable ancestor of the orange trifles and citrus-and-custard puddings that stayed on Canadian and American tables well into the twentieth century.