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Glace a L'Orange
Place in a small saucepan the chopped rind of a good-sized, sound, juicy orange, also the juice of same, with one ounce sugar and half gill water. Boil on fire five minutes. Place in a bowl and let infuse ten minutes. Place two ounces glazed sugar in a saucepan, strain infusion into this pan, sharply stir on fire until lukewarm, then use as directed.
A French-style orange glaze rendered into English with the units and vocabulary of a professional kitchen around 1900. Two terms need decoding before anything else.
- "Glazed sugar"This is a literal rendering of sucre glace, French for confectioners' or icing sugar. It is not caramel and not a commercial glaze; use plain powdered sugar, sifted.
- Half a gillA gill is a quarter pint, so half a gill is 2 fluid ounces by the American measure (2 1/2 fluid ounces if the book is reckoning in imperial), a scant quarter cup. One ounce of granulated sugar is about 2 tablespoons; two ounces of powdered sugar is roughly half a cup, loosely packed.
- The rind matters more than the juiceChop only the coloured zest. Any white pith carried into the syrup turns the finished glaze bitter, and five minutes of boiling plus ten of infusing extracts that bitterness efficiently.
- The infusion, not the boil, does the workThe infusion is not an afterthought -- The five-minute boil begins the extraction of the peel oils and the ten-minute rest off the heat carries it further. The recipe gives no reason for either timing, so keep both as written rather than shortening the rest.
- Consistency will need adjustingConsistency may need adjusting -- The finished glaze carries three ounces of sugar in all (one boiled with the peel, two stirred in at the end) against half a gill of water, some of which boils away, plus the juice of a whole orange. Even so it is likely to come out closer to a pourable syrup than to a glaze that sets; add powdered sugar by the tablespoon until it coats the back of a spoon.
- "Sharply stir on fire until lukewarm"Warm gently over low heat while whisking, only until the sugar has dissolved and the mixture is barely warm to the touch. Taking it hotter thins it and dulls the fresh orange note the infusion was made for.
- Yield and useSomething under a cup of glaze. "Use as directed" points back to whichever recipe sent you here; apply it while both glaze and cake are just warm.
Glaces in the French pastry sense are not ice creams but thin sugar coatings, brushed over cakes and petits fours to give a gloss and a seal against drying. This one belongs to the family of glaces à l'eau, water icings flavoured by infusion rather than by extract. The wording here, with its "glazed sugar" for sucre glace and its terse "use as directed," reads as a professional formula translated rather than a recipe written out for a home cook: the reader is assumed to know already what the glaze was for and to need only the proportions.