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Candied Citron
Peel and cut in sections, removing all seeds; let stand over night in brine made of half a cup of salt to a gallon of water. Drain, rinse, and cook until tender in fresh water. Let cool in the water. Take sugar equal to the weight of the citron before cooking and a cup of water to each pound of sugar; let boil, and skim. In this syrup cook the citron until transparent; remove and let the syrup simmer until quite thick; put in the pieces of citron and let stand over night. Take out the citron, reheat the syrup, pour it over the citron, and let stand again. Repeat till the citron will take up no more syrup. Then let dry off and store.
How to Preserve Eggs To preserve eggs for any length of time, exclude the air by covering them with fat, wax, strong brine, or lime-water; or pack them in sawdust, or meal.
Eggs may be kept fresh in a cool, dry place for months by packing them, small ends down, in a bed of ordinary coarse salt. The shells should not come in contact, and each egg should stand upright. The salt holds the egg firmly in position and excludes the air. Fine rock salt, such as is often used in freezing, is adapted to this purpose.
Solution for Preserving Eggs (United States Agricultural Department) Fill an earthen or water-tight wooden vessel with eggs. To one part of water glass, also known as soluble glass and silicate of soda, add ten parts of tepid water, stirring the water thoroughly and slowly into the water glass.
When the resultant mixture is cold, pour it gently over the eggs, using sufficient to immerse them. Three pints of water glass and thirty pints, or fifteen quarts, of water will generally cover fifty dozen eggs. Keep the vessel covered and in a cool place.
To Preserve Eggs for Use in Winter Into each three gallons of water mix one pint of freshly-slacked lime and one half pint of common salt; put in the eggs and cover with a board sprinkled with lime and salt.
1 quart salt I ounce saltpetre
A classic gradual-candying method: the fruit is drawn into syrup over several days rather than boiled hard in one go. The instructions assume a cook who knows what "transparent" looks like and has a warm dry place to finish the pieces.
- Which citronTwo different fruits went by this name in American kitchens. True citron (Citrus medica) is a thick-rinded citrus grown for its peel; citron melon, a hard white-fleshed watermelon relative, was grown in kitchen gardens for preserving. "Peel and cut in sections, removing all seeds" reads more like the melon, which is probably what this book means, though the method works for citrus peel as well.
- The brineHalf a cup of salt to a gallon of water is a mild brine, on the order of 3 to 4 percent. It firms the flesh so the pieces hold their shape through days of syruping rather than collapsing. Rinse well afterward or the finished candy will taste faintly of salt.
- Weigh before cooking"Sugar equal to the weight of the citron before cooking" is ambiguous: it can be read as the weight of the peeled, seeded fruit before it goes into the brine, or as its weight after brining and draining but before it is cooked in fresh water. Weigh at whichever point you choose and write the number down; everything downstream, including the cup of water per pound of sugar, depends on it.
- Why the repeatsThis is the hinge. Each cycle raises the syrup's sugar concentration a little and lets the fruit equalize overnight. Rushing it by boiling the fruit in heavy syrup drives water out too fast and leaves tough, shrunken pieces with a raw center. The recipe sets no number of rounds; the fruit is done taking up syrup when the syrup level stops dropping.
- Reading "transparent"The flesh turns from opaque white to a glassy, faintly amber translucency, and a piece cut in half shows no chalky core. It is the doneness cue for the syruping stage, and a reliable one.
- Drying offLift the pieces onto a rack over a tray and leave them in a warm airy spot until the surface is tacky rather than wet. The recipe says only "let dry off," with no oven or temperature specified. Some cooks roll the dried pieces in granulated sugar to keep them from sticking together.
- Storage and yieldStorage -- Store airtight in a cool cupboard; properly candied fruit keeps many months, and pieces that weep can be dried off again.
- The material after the recipeEverything from "How to Preserve Eggs" onward is a separate entry that has run together with this one in the original text. It is not part of the citron, and the waterglass, lime and salt-packing methods it describes belong to a period before reliable refrigeration. Do not preserve eggs by those methods; refrigerate them.
Candied citron was a fixture of the American winter baking cupboard, chopped into fruitcake, mincemeat and Christmas puddings, and before the twentieth century it was imported as succade from Corsica, Sicily and Leghorn, where the thick-rinded citron was grown chiefly for its peel. Home preservers who could not get the citrus fruit turned to the citron melon, a hard, nearly flavorless watermelon relative that grew easily in northern gardens and whose whole virtue was its ability to absorb sugar and hold its shape. Recipes of this kind, built on brining, slow syruping over several days and a final drying, descend from a confectioner's technique much older than the book they appear in; the same graduated syrup method is described in English and French sugar manuals well back into the eighteenth century. Their inclusion in a printed collection reflects a household economy in which garden surplus was converted into shelf-stable sweets in autumn, against the December baking.