Orange Cream
Rub two cupfuls of sugar on the outside peel of two oranges and add the juice of six oranges and enough water to make a pint and a half. Boil this until clear, and strain through a muslin bag. When cold, beat it up thoroughly with half pint of thick cream; then stir in one ounce of gelatine soaked in a little cold water. To be put in moulds and hardened on ice.
A molded orange cream in the old style: an orange syrup set with gelatine and lightened with cream. Two things decide whether it works — how much gelatine you actually use, and how you bring the acid syrup and the cream together.
- Gelatine, the critical adjustmentOne ounce is roughly four envelopes (28 g) of modern powdered gelatine, which would set four cups of liquid very firmly indeed. Period gelatine was less standardised than the modern product, and old recipes routinely call for more of it; with a modern product use about half an ounce (two envelopes, 14 g) for a cream that holds a mould but still yields to a spoon.
- Rubbing sugar on the peelThis is the classic oleo-saccharum method — the sugar crystals abrade the zest and absorb the citrus oil, which carries far more orange aroma than the juice does. Use unwaxed oranges and rub until the sugar is damp and orange-tinted.
- Measure the liquid after boiling"Boil this until clear" will drive off water, so top the strained syrup back up to a pint and a half (three cups) once it has settled, or the set will be too stiff and too sweet.
- Keeping the cream from curdlingOrange juice is acidic enough to break cream. Have both thoroughly cold, whisk the syrup into the cream in a slow stream rather than the reverse, and do not let the mixture warm up on the counter.
- Dissolving the gelatineSoak it in a few tablespoons of cold water until spongy, then melt it over gentle heat — never boiling — and stir it in while it is still fluid but no hotter than lukewarm. Poured in hot it will both curdle the cream and set in strings.
- "Hardened on ice"Setting in an ice-chest or packed in ice rather than a freezer. Refrigerate the filled moulds four to six hours, or overnight; the mixture wants to be at refrigerator temperature throughout, not merely chilled on the surface.
- UnmouldingRinse the moulds with cold water before filling, then dip the set cream briefly in warm water and invert onto a wetted plate so it can be slid into position.
- YieldAbout four cups of mixture — six to eight servings in individual moulds, or one quart mould. It is served as a dessert cream in its own right.
Orange cream belongs to a long line of English and American "creams" — flavoured, sweetened dairy set into a shape — that runs from the isinglass and hartshorn jellies of the eighteenth century through blancmange to the moulded gelatine desserts that filled American cookbooks around 1900. What made this version practical for an ordinary household was granulated gelatine sold in packets, which from the 1890s increasingly displaced the laborious business of boiling down calves' feet or clarifying isinglass; the convenience is usually credited to American manufacturers marketing packaged gelatine to home cooks. The sugar-rubbed-on-peel technique is much older than the gelatine, and survives today mainly in bartending, where oleo-saccharum is a common way to get citrus oil into punch. If the book does file this among sauces, that is a reminder that the category was looser then: a cold cream of this kind might be turned out whole as a dessert or spooned, softly set, over a plain pudding.