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Fruit Candies: Remove
DATE DELIGHT Take two cupfuls of light brown sugar, one cupful of milk, and one tablespoonful of butter. Boil to the soft ball stage. Add a teaspoonful of vanilla, and one cupful of chopped dates. Beat up until creamy. Pour into buttered pan or mold, and cut into squares when cold. STUFFED PRUNES Remove the stones from the prunes. Crack the stones and chop up the pits. Add the chopped pits to chopped dates, and fill the cavities of the prunes with the mixture. Dip the prunes in melted fondant. Another way to stuff the prunes is to stone some dates, fit a cherry inside of each date, then fit the date into the prune, and dip in the fondant. The prunes should be soaked in water for several hours before stuffing, and should be drained and wiped dry. Prunes filled with fondant or fondant and nuts mixed are also delicious. FRUIT ROLL Cook two cupfuls of brown sugar, one-half cupful of golden corn syrup and one-fourth cupful of water until it spins a thread. Remove from the fire and add the grated rind of one lemon and one orange, and a teaspoonful of the juice of each, one cupful of seeded raisins, one cupful of English currants, one-half cupful of cocoanut, one-half cupful of dates, and one-fourth cupful of figs; these fruits should all be run through a food chopper. Stir all until it forms a mass. Roll out into a thin sheet, and then roll up like a jelly roll, and cut into thin slices.
JELLY CAKE CANDY Melt some fondant and pour into a square or round mold. Candy boxes lined with waxed paper will do. When cool place over this a thin layer of some thick jelly, such as currant, red raspberry, or orange; then pour over this another layer of fondant, and when this has cooled spread with another thin layer of jelly and pour over the top some more fondant. The layers of fondant may be colored differently if desired, and flavored to suit the jelly used. When cold turn out of mold, and cut into thin slices.
Four separate confections share this page, three of them straightforward sugar work. The second one, Stuffed Prunes, calls for cracking the prune stones and eating the kernels inside, and that is the reason for the caution above.
- Why the stuffed prunes failPrune (plum) kernels contain amygdalin, a cyanogenic glycoside that releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed and moistened. Chopping the pits and packing them raw into fruit is exactly the handling that liberates it, and the quantity here is uncontrolled. Do not eat prune, plum, apricot or peach kernels; if you want stuffed prunes, use a current recipe.
- The rest of the pageDate Delight, Fruit Roll and Jelly Cake Candy involve nothing more hazardous than boiling sugar. The notes below apply to those three only.
- Soft ball stageRoughly 235-240F on a candy thermometer, or a spoonful dropped into cold water that gathers into a ball you can flatten between your fingers. For the Date Delight, pull it at soft ball and let it cool to about 110F before beating -- beating a hot fudge mixture gives coarse grain.
- "Spins a thread"About 230-235F, the thread or large-thread stage, just short of soft ball. The Fruit Roll needs a syrup stiff enough to bind ground fruit into a mass but not so hard it sets before you can roll it, so work quickly once it comes off the heat.
- English currantsNot fresh currants but dried Zante currants, the small black raisins sold in the baking aisle. "Cocoanut" is dried shredded coconut; the sweetened kind is fine here, unsweetened gives a less cloying roll.
- Food chopperA hand-cranked grinder. A food processor pulsed in short bursts does the same job, but the dried fruit will clump into a paste if you run it continuously -- stop while the pieces are still distinct.
- Melting fondantFondant scorches and turns grainy over direct heat. Melt it in a bowl set over barely simmering water, adding a teaspoon of water or syrup at a time until it flows, and keep it under about 150F so it still sets with a sheen.
- Yield and pansThe Date Delight will fill an 8-inch square pan as a shallow slab, though the exact yield depends on how far the syrup is boiled down. The Fruit Roll makes a substantial log; chill it an hour before slicing or it will squash. The Jelly Cake Candy needs each fondant layer fully set before the next goes on, or the jelly bleeds through.
Candy books of this era lean hard on dried fruit: dates, figs, prunes and raisins recur throughout. The Fruit Roll here is essentially a sugar-bound version of the ground-fruit confections that also produced mincemeat and fruitcake fillings, and Jelly Cake Candy is a fondant-maker's showpiece -- layered, sliced to display the stripes, and cheap to build once you had a batch of fondant on hand. The instruction to crack prune stones and use the kernels reflects the treatment of stone-fruit kernels as a cheap almond substitute, the same impulse behind noyau flavourings; it is generally traced to European kitchen thrift, and it persisted in print well after the cyanogenic chemistry of those kernels was understood.