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Apricot Paste
Peel and stone some apricots, and put them into a dish in a warm oven; cover the fruit with another dish, and let them remain until they are tender; then take them out and let them get cold. When this is done, take the same weight of powdered loaf sugar as there was fruit, and moisten it with a small quantity of water; boil it until ready to candy, and then mix the apricots with it; stir the syrup continually, and boil it until it becomes of the consistency of marmalade. Make this paste into the shape of apricots, and put it in a warm place. When dry it will be found very transparent. Time to boil the sugar and fruit, till it is stiff and smooth.
A Victorian fruit paste of the pâte de fruits family: equal weights of fruit and sugar, cooked down until stiff, then shaped and dried. The whole thing hangs on cooking the mixture far enough that it holds a shape without weeping.
- The hinge: cook it stiffer than you think"Consistency of marmalade" understates it. The paste is ready when a wooden spoon drawn across the bottom of the pan leaves a clean track that holds for a second or two, and the mass pulls away from the sides in a single sheet. Anything looser will slump instead of drying into shapes.
- Loaf sugar, powderedLoaf sugar was refined cane sugar sold in a hard cone and broken up as needed; "powdered" meant pounded fine, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar of today. Ordinary granulated sugar is the correct substitute, weight for weight with the prepared fruit.
- "Ready to candy"This is roughly the point at which the syrup would crystallise if disturbed; period sources are imprecise about it, and on a modern thermometer it falls somewhere in the firm- to hard-ball range. Moisten the sugar with only enough water to wet it thoroughly, as the recipe's "small quantity of water" implies.
- The warm oven for the fruitSoftening the apricots between two inverted dishes is a covered, gentle bake that steams them in their own juice; the recipe gives no temperature or time, only "until they are tender." A covered baking dish does the same job. The recipe has the fruit cooled before it meets the sugar.
- Pan and stirringUse a wide, heavy pan, not a tall one. Fruit and sugar at this concentration scorch quickly and spit as they thicken; stir continuously with a long-handled wooden spoon and expect 20-40 minutes depending on how juicy the apricots were.
- "A warm place" to dryAny source of gentle residual heat, such as a cooling oven. An oven at its lowest setting, 120-150F, with the door propped, or a dehydrator, will dry shaped pieces in several hours. They should be tacky-dry outside and translucent through, as the recipe's "very transparent" suggests.
- Yield and keepingThe recipe gives no quantities, only equal weights of prepared fruit and sugar. A good deal of water boils off, so the finished paste weighs less than the combined starting weight. Roll the shapes in caster sugar and layer them between waxed paper in a tin; the sugar content keeps them for months, though they harden with age.
Fruit pastes of this kind are among the oldest confections in the English repertoire, descending from the medieval and Tudor "chardequince" and the quince marmalades that gave marmalade its name (from the Portuguese marmelo, quince). By the seventeenth century, still-room books were full of them, and the pastes were often moulded to imitate the fruit they were made from, or pressed into printed wooden moulds, for the banquet course of sweetmeats served after dinner. Taking the syrup to the candy stage first, then driving off moisture with the fruit, reaches a sugar concentration high enough that the paste keeps -- which, before domestic refrigeration, was much of the point of an apricot glut.