Home › The World's Kitchen › Oranges
Oranges
Peel and carefully detach all fibres adhering to four good-sized, sound, juicy, cold oranges. Then with a keen knife cut them crosswise into thin, equal slices. Lay them on a dish with all their juice; liberally dredge powdered sugar over them. Let stand in a cool place, and just before serving pour in a pony of curacao, Swiss kirsch, kummel or cognac. Dress them nicely on a dessert dish in crown shape. Thoroughly mix the liquor, sugar, etc., pour it over the oranges and serve.
A macerated orange dessert that needs no cooking; the only real skill is in the knife work and the resting time.
- A ponyA pony is one fluid ounce, about 2 tablespoons. That is the total for four oranges, so the liqueur perfumes rather than soaks.
- Powdered sugarIn period usage this means finely ground granulated sugar, closer to today's caster or superfine sugar than to modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch and will cloud the juice. Superfine sugar dissolves in the juice without grit.
- Choosing the fruitThe recipe asks only for sound, juicy oranges. Any sweet eating orange will do; thick-pithed juicing varieties are harder to slice cleanly.
- Detaching the fibresThis is the hinge. Peel with a knife rather than by hand, cutting away every scrap of white pith and the thready membrane over the flesh, or the dish turns bitter and stringy no matter how much sugar goes on.
- CuttingCrosswise into rounds of even thickness; the recipe asks only for thin, equal slices. Work over the dish so no juice is lost, since the syrup is that juice and the sugar, with the liquor stirred in at the end.
- Cool placeNo time is given. A cool place or the refrigerator, long enough for the sugar to draw out the juice; left very long the slices slump and lose their edges.
- Timing the liquorThe spirit goes in just before serving, as written, so the aroma is still fresh at the table.
- Crown shapeOverlapping rounds laid in a ring around the rim of a shallow dish, with the syrup poured into the center.
- YieldFour oranges serve four as a light dessert, or two if it is the whole of the sweet course.
Sliced oranges under sugar and a spoonful of spirit are often said to be among the closings of the nineteenth-century restaurant repertoire. The four liquors offered here map the era's drinks cabinet neatly: curaçao from the Dutch Caribbean bitter-orange trade, kirsch distilled from cherries in Switzerland and Alsace, kümmel flavored with caraway from the German and Baltic north, and cognac from the Charente. The dish asks for no cooking and almost no work, only good winter citrus and a bottle: cold, sharp, and scented, after a long series of rich courses.