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Apricot Chips
Put one pound of unpeeled apricots, cut into slices, into a thick syrup made of two pounds of sugar boiled with a pint of water until it is nearly candied. Let them stand in this a couple of hours; then put them into a preserving-pan, and make them as hot as possible without boiling. Take them from the fire and let them stand all night. Next day remove the chips from the syrup, spread them on plates, and dry them. Time to remain in the candy, twenty-four hours.
A candying recipe rather than a preserve: the fruit is steeped in a very heavy syrup, heated below boiling, then dried until the slices are firm and translucent. The hinge is never letting the syrup boil once the fruit is in it, or the slices collapse into jam.
- The syrup stageTwo pounds of sugar to one pint of water boiled "until it is nearly candied" means a very heavy syrup taken well past the thread stage, into the ball stages, though the book gives no temperature and the term is imprecise. Period sugar-boiling was generally judged by dropping a little into cold water; a thermometer is more reliable and stops you tipping over into caramel.
- A pint here is 20 fl ozThis is an imperial pint, 2.5 US cups, not 2. With 2 lb of sugar the syrup is heavily supersaturated, which is the point: it draws water out of the fruit and replaces it with sugar.
- "As hot as possible without boiling"Hold the pan hot but short of the boil. Boiling agitates the slices and breaks them down, and the recipe depends on the apricots keeping their shape through the heating and the long soak.
- Fruit choiceUse apricots that are ripe but still firm, and cut them into slices no thicker than about a quarter inch. Overripe fruit turns to pulp in the syrup; tinned apricots are already saturated with syrup and will not work.
- Unpeeled is deliberateUnpeeled is specified -- the skin most likely helps hold each slice together during the soaking and drying. Leave it on and wash the fruit well instead.
- Drying the chipsSpreading on plates assumes a warm kitchen or the residual heat of a cooling range over a day or more. An oven at its lowest setting with the door ajar, or a dehydrator at 130-140F, does the same job in 6-12 hours. They are ready when tacky but not wet, and no longer sticky enough to fuse together.
- Timing as writtenTwo hours in the syrup, one heating, overnight standing, then removal the next day. The closing line, twenty-four hours in the candy, is the total the fruit spends in the syrup and should be treated as the target rather than a second soak.
- Yield and keepingExpect appreciably less than a pound of finished chips from a pound of fruit. Toss in caster sugar to stop them sticking and store in a tin between sheets of paper; they keep for several weeks somewhere cool and dry, and go sticky in humidity.
- The leftover syrupWhat comes off the fruit is a heavy apricot-flavoured sugar syrup and worth keeping for puddings or drinks rather than discarding. Strain it while warm.
Candied fruit of this kind sits in the long confectioner's tradition of "wet" and "dry" suckets, the sweetmeats that closed a formal English meal from the sixteenth century onward, and the technique was still current when Cassell's Dictionary appeared in the late Victorian period. The logic is preservation: sugar at these concentrations binds enough water that spoilage organisms cannot grow, which is why an apricot harvest that would rot in a week could be carried through the winter as chips in a tin. Apricots reached England from Central Asia by way of the Mediterranean and were grown against south-facing walls in country-house gardens; recipes like this one, along with jams and cheeses, were the answer to a surplus of fruit. The word "chips" here most likely means thin slices, an older sense of the word that seems to survive in wood chips rather than in anything fried.