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Kate Dicey
 
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Default Sugar orange - English treat?



A R Whitaker wrote:
>
> A book written and set in England in the 1930s mentions someone
> ordering an orange and adorning it with sugar. Later she spoons juice
> out of it. One other person is mentioned as having the same treat.
> I'm guessing that the orange is halved and sprinkled with sugar,
> because I've often eaten grapefruit that way, with a specially pointed
> spoon for extracting the pulp.
> The part that makes me hesitate is that the eaters are referred
> to as spooning out the juice - just the juice, not the pulp. We
> spooned up the grapefruit pulp, then picked up the rind and squeezed
> the remaining juice into the spoon.
> Does anyone recognize this treat? (I'm inquiring in connection
> with a project involving food in literature.)


Are you reading dear Stella's Cold Comfort Farm by any chance? Very
innovative book that, on several counts... I'm sure it's the
conversation in the cafe, in which there is also the first use of the
word 'homosexual' in English literature.

As for the eating of oranges with the spoon, I always felt that the
reference to spooning the juice up meant that they'd eaten the rest of
the orange and there was only juice left. It used to be quite a common
way to eat oranges in 'polite company', like eating pears with a knife
and fork (to which there is a classic reference in Alan Garner's The Owl
Service').
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