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Cumquat Preserves
Wash a quart box of fruit, make a small slit in the ends of each cumquat, and let soak in cold water over night. This slit lets the water through and softens the otherwise tough skin. In the morning pour off the water.
Cover with fresh, cold water and bring to boiling point, then let cook until the skins are tender. Set aside over night. Next day take the weight of the cumquats and liquid in sugar.
Heat the liquid and fruit to the boiling point; add the sugar gradually, that the boiling may not cease and let boil rapidly until the syrup is clear and thickened somewhat. Store as canned fruit or as jelly.
Cumquat Preserves No. 2 Cut the cumquats (without peeling) into halves or quarters and take out the seeds.
Weigh the pieces of cumquat. Take one pound or three fourths a pound (according to richness desired) of sugar for each pound of fruit, also half the weight of the fruit in water. Let the fruit simmer in the water until it is perfectly tender but not in the least broken. Skim out the fruit. To the liquid, which has lost in volume by evaporation, add water, that the whole may equal half the weight of the sugar; add also the juice of a lemon for each pound of fruit. When the sugar has melted, let the whole boil five or six minutes, then skim, add the cumquats, and let simmer until transparent.
Should the syrup be too thin, reduce it by boiling. The syrup should be of the same consistency as that in jars of preserved ginger. This may be stored in empty ginger jars.
Two methods for the same fruit: the first keeps the kumquats whole, the second halves and seeds them and finishes them in a heavy ginger-style syrup. Both depend on getting the peel genuinely tender before any sugar goes in.
- The hinge: tender peel before sugarSugar firms the skins, and they soften very little once it is in. Simmer until a kumquat can be pierced with no resistance — the time varies with size and season — before you add anything sweet.
- A quart box of fruitA dry quart of kumquats runs somewhere around 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb, perhaps 30-40 fruits depending on size. Expect roughly three half-pint jars in method one.
- "The weight of the cumquats and liquid in sugar"Read literally this means weighing fruit plus cooking water together and matching that in sugar, which gives an extremely heavy syrup. Reduce the cooking liquid first, or weigh only the drained fruit and use an equal weight of sugar; method two's stated ratios are the more reliable guide.
- Method two's proportionsPer pound of seeded fruit: 12-16 oz sugar, 8 oz water, and the juice of one lemon. The lemon is not only for flavour — the acid helps the syrup hold and keeps the sugar from crystallising.
- Judging the syrupPreserved-ginger syrup is heavy and clinging; if you use a thermometer, the low 220sF (about 105C) is a rough guide only. Better to test by cooling a spoonful on a chilled saucer rather than boiling by the clock.
- Adding sugar graduallyThe instruction to keep the boil going as sugar goes in is sound practice. Add it in three or four handfuls, stirring only until dissolved.
- Overnight standingThe rests are not idle time. The recipe says the slit lets the water through to soften the otherwise tough skin during the overnight soak, and the stand after the first cooking lets the fruit settle so it takes syrup evenly.
- Storing safely"Store as canned fruit" meant sealing hot jars and trusting the sugar. Use current practice instead: fill sterilised half-pint jars, leave 1/4 inch headspace, and process in a boiling-water bath for 10 minutes. The old ginger jars have no seal and belong in the refrigerator, eaten within a few weeks.
- SeedsMethod one leaves the seeds in the whole fruit. Warn anyone at the table, or slit and squeeze them out with the point of a knife before the first soak.
Kumquats — the spelling wavered between cumquat and kumquat well into the twentieth century — are generally said to have reached American kitchens by way of the citrus-growing states in the later nineteenth century, and a book of this vintage treats them as a novelty worth explaining rather than a staple. Because the fruit is eaten skin and all, with the sweetness in the rind and the sourness in the flesh, it behaves less like an orange than like a candied peel, which is why both methods here are structured as long preserving rather than quick jam. The instruction to match the syrup to "that in jars of preserved ginger," and to reuse the emptied ginger jars, points to how familiar imported stem ginger in syrup was in well-stocked households of the period: it was the reference point a reader could taste from memory. Preserving in heavy syrup was also the standard defence against spoilage before reliable processing times were published, the sugar concentration itself doing the work that a water bath now does.