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Fruit Candies: Fill
SURPRISE DATES Select some nice large dates and remove the stones. Fill some of the cavities with chopped raisins, figs, nuts and so forth, and some with chopped candied cherries; try to have the varieties of fillings as great as possible. Fondant with several different flavorings may also be used. Dip some of these stuffed dates in chocolate fondant, some in different colored fondants and some in plain white. Every date eaten then will prove to be a surprise and delight. MARSHMALLOW FRUIT FUDGE Tear out a piece from the center of each marshmallow, being careful not to make a hole quite through it. Fill the cavities thus formed with any good preserved fruit. Make a chocolate fudge and pour it over the marshmallows, which should have been placed on greased paper in a pan. Be sure that the fruit is entirely covered. When cold cut out in cakes; they can be dipped in chocolate or left as they are. These are delicious and will prove an agreeable surprise to those who have never eaten them before.
FROSTED FRUIT FUDGE Make a good chocolate fudge, beating it until creamy, and pour it into a greased pan to about an inch in depth. When this is almost hard cover with any thick preserved fruit desired. Then place in a kettle one cup of granulated sugar, a fourth cupful of water and a pinch of cream of tartar. When the mixture has boiled to the hard ball stage pour it over the stiffly beaten white of one egg, add a teaspoonful of vanilla, or the kind of flavoring that will combine best with the fruit used, and beat up until light and foamy. Pour this over the fruit in the pan. When cold cut into squares, and you will have a delicious candy. Nut meats can be mixed in with the fruit. Almonds are also very good combined with peach preserves.
Three variations on the same idea: a soft fruit or confection hollowed out, filled, and coated. None of the three gives you a base fudge or fondant formula, so read them as assembly instructions that assume the earlier chapters of the book.
- You need a fondant and a fudge firstBoth are referenced as though already made. Any cooked fondant (sugar syrup boiled to 238-240F, cooled, then worked until opaque) and any standard cocoa or chocolate fudge will serve. Fondant for dipping should be warmed over water to about 100-105F, no hotter, or it loses its gloss and sets grainy.
- Hard ball stageFor the frosting on the fruit fudge, that means roughly 250-266F on a thermometer. Undercooked syrup gives a soft frosting that will not hold a cut edge; overcooked syrup sets hard and tends to crack when sliced.
- Pouring hot syrup onto egg whiteThis is Italian meringue. Beat the white to stiff peaks before the syrup is ready, then add the syrup in a thin stream down the side of the bowl with the mixer running. Dumping it in at once cooks the white into threads.
- Marshmallows have changedMarshmallows of this period were moulded rather than extruded, and were generally firmer and drier than the modern kind. Modern standard marshmallows are small and springy and awkward to hollow out; the jumbo size, or homemade, works better, with a small melon baller or the handle of a teaspoon.
- DatesMedjool dates are the right choice for stuffing, being large and pliable. Deglet Noor are drier and will crack. Slit lengthwise rather than cutting through, so the filling stays put when dipped.
- "Thick preserved fruit"Means a stiff, low-moisture preserve or whole candied fruit, not a runny jam. Watery fruit will bleed into the fudge and stop the frosting from setting. Drain and blot anything in syrup.
- CuttingBoth fudges want to be fully cold before cutting, and a thin knife wiped between cuts. For the marshmallow version, cut with a hot dry blade so the marshmallow shears cleanly instead of dragging.
- YieldNo quantities are given. A batch of fudge an inch deep in an 8-inch square pan will give roughly three dozen small squares, depending how you cut it; a pound of dates is somewhere between about 20 and 40 pieces depending on the variety and size.
This page belongs to the brief American vogue for home candy making that ran from roughly the 1890s through the 1920s, when cheap granulated sugar and factory-made chocolate coating brought work that had been a confectioner's trade into the domestic kitchen. Dates and figs were the fashionable novelty of that moment: improved shipping put boxed dates in ordinary grocery stores, and stuffed dates turn up constantly in candy books, church-bazaar pamphlets and Christmas-box lists of the period. The commercial marshmallow, still a fairly new confection made from gelatin rather than the marsh mallow root that gave it its name, gets treated here as a raw ingredient rather than a sweet in its own right, which is a good marker of how quickly manufactured goods were absorbed into home recipes. The repeated promise of a "surprise" is the real point of the section, though what exactly the surprise was meant to do for a gathering can only be guessed at.