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Candied Fruit
Stone cherries. Remove hard center and outside and cut pineapples in slices. Let cook in boiling water until tender. For a pound of drained fruit, cook one pound and a quarter of sugar and a cup of the water, in which the fruit was cooked, to the soft ball stage (238° F.).
Remove from fire and pour over the fruit, set in a shallow dish. The syrup should cover the fruit. Return to the fire and let boil once.
Set aside until next day. Drain on a sieve.
To the syrup add half a cup of sugar and again cook to 238° F. Put in the fruit, let boil once, and set aside over night. Repeat this process three times, adding half a cup of sugar each time.
The fruit, by this time, will probably have taken up all the syrup it will absorb. Let dry off a little and store in glass, tightly-closed. Pineapple in slices may need to be reheated in the syrup four or five times. Each variety of fruit should take up all the syrup possible.
Where fruit is candied in large quantity, shallow trays provided with wire screens, to keep the fruit under the syrup, are used. If the syrup crusts, do not add the half-cup of sugar at the next boiling, but add a few tablespoonfuls of boiling water.
This is a proper multi-day candying, in which sugar concentration in the syrup is raised a little at a time so the fruit gives up water without collapsing. The instructions are sound; what they omit is how long the whole thing takes and how to finish the fruit.
- Plan on a weekPlan on several days — Each cycle is a day: boil once, stand overnight, drain, re-cook the syrup. With the three repeats plus the first pass, cherries need about four days; pineapple, which the recipe says may need reheating four or five times, five or six. Rushing the steps tends to produce shrivelled, leathery fruit.
- 238°F means a thermometerThe original already gives the number. Use a digital or candy thermometer clipped to the pan, and calibrate it in boiling water first — at altitude the boiling point, and so the soft-ball target, drops roughly 1°F per 500 feet of elevation.
- ProportionsOne pound of drained cooked fruit to 1¼ lb sugar (about 2¾ cups) and one cup of the cooking water. The half-cup additions on each subsequent day are on top of that. Weigh the fruit after blanching and draining, not before.
- Blanch only to tenderThe fruit should be cooked through before it meets syrup, since sugar sets the texture and nothing will soften it much afterwards. Cherries need only a few minutes, pineapple slices rather longer. Stop while a skewer meets slight resistance.
- Keep the fruit submergedAnything above the syrup line dries hard and discolours. The wire screens mentioned for large batches can be improvised with a small plate or a round of baking parchment pressed down onto the surface.
- If the syrup crustsFollow the note at the end rather than the main instruction — skip the sugar and add a few tablespoons of boiling water. Crusting means the syrup has passed the saturation point and further sugar will only seed crystals through the whole batch.
- "Let dry off a little"Lift the fruit onto a rack and dry it at 120–150°F — the lowest oven setting with the door ajar, or a dehydrator — until the surface is tacky rather than wet, usually several hours. Undried fruit weeps in the jar and moulds at the surface.
- Storage and yieldStorage — Airtight glass in a cool cupboard; correctly saturated candied fruit keeps for months.
Candying is among the older ways of preserving fruit: sugar replaces the water in the tissue until little is left for microbes to grow in, and the technique is generally held to have reached northern Europe through Arab and then Venetian sugar trading. The slow ladder of syrups here — a little more sugar each day rather than one strong bath — is the confectioner's method, meant to avoid the shrinkage and toughening that a sudden osmotic shock produces. The exact figure, 238°F, given alongside the older 'soft ball' language the recipe also uses, reflects the growing use of the thermometer in home candy-making. Candied cherries and pineapple were in demand for fruitcake and holiday baking, and canned Hawaiian pineapple had helped make the fruit familiar on the mainland.