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Crystallized Fruits
Pineapples, apricots, pears, cherries, and orange, grapefruit, and lemon peel are usually selected for crystallization. In general, the fruit is cooked in a rich syrup and cooled in the syrup repeatedly, or on each day for a week or longer, until it is thoroughly saturated with syrup; it is then rolled in granulated sugar and stored in tightly-closed receptacles.
This is a method sketch rather than a measured recipe, the sort of summary a preserving manual gave before the detailed tables. The essentials are sound, but the blanks need filling.
- What "rich syrup" meansCandying works by gradually replacing the water in the fruit with sugar. Start around 30 degrees Brix (roughly 1 part sugar to 2 parts water by weight) and raise the concentration each day by adding sugar and reboiling, finishing near 70-75 Brix. Going in with heavy syrup from the start shrivels and toughens the fruit.
- The hinge: patience, not heatThe fruit is brought just to a simmer in the syrup and then left to steep off the heat until the next day. Boiling hard, or trying to compress the week into an afternoon, collapses the cell walls and you get shrunken, leathery pieces instead of plump translucent ones.
- Blanch firstFirm fruit and citrus peel are simmered in plain water until tender before they ever meet syrup. Once sugar enters, the fruit will not soften further. Citrus peel usually needs two or three changes of water to draw out bitterness.
- A candy thermometer or a refractometerThe original relies on the cook's eye. A jam thermometer reading the syrup at 105-108C on the last day, or an inexpensive refractometer, tells you far more reliably when saturation is complete.
- Invert sugar stops grainingStopping the syrup graining -- A spoonful of glucose syrup, or a pinch of cream of tartar (which inverts some of the sucrose as it cooks), helps keep the syrup from crystallizing into a gritty mass in the pan.
- Drying before the sugar rollDrain the fruit on a rack and let it dry to a tacky, non-sticky surface, several hours in a warm airy place or a couple of hours in an oven at its lowest setting with the door ajar. Rolling wet fruit in granulated sugar dissolves the sugar and makes a syrupy mess.
- "Tightly-closed receptacles"Airtight tins or jars, kept cool and dark. Properly saturated candied fruit keeps for months at room temperature; underdone fruit still holds enough free water to mould, so if any piece feels soft or weeping, refrigerate the batch and use it quickly.
- Fruit choicePineapple, apricots, firm pears and citrus peel all hold up. Cherries need pitting and are usually firmed in a brine or lime solution first in commercial practice; without that step expect them to slump.
Candying is one of the oldest forms of preserving, older than canning by centuries: sugar in high enough concentration binds the water a spoilage organism needs, which is why fruits put up this way travelled well before refrigeration. Medieval and early modern European confectioners, whose sugar and much of whose technique reached them by way of the Arab world, called the finished goods suckets and wet or dry succades, and the slow multi-day escalation of syrup strength described here follows the same principle. The candied peel and glace cherries that turn up in holiday fruitcake are the direct descendants.