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Apricots, to Candy
Slit the fruit on one side and take out the stone, dry them separately on a dish, and cover them with crushed lump sugar. Bake them in a hot oven, and then dry them in a warm place for a few days.
A characteristically terse Victorian sugaring method: the sugar draws out the fruit's juice, a short blast of heat sets a syrup, and slow air-drying finishes the job. The instructions assume you already know what candied fruit should look like, so a few gaps need filling.
- No quantities givenThe original names no weight of sugar. Candying by this method generally calls for something in the order of the fruit's own weight in sugar; too little and the fruit dries leathery instead of crystallising.
- Lump sugarLump or loaf sugar was refined cane sugar broken from a cone; crushed, it is close to today's coarse or preserving sugar. Granulated works, though very fine sugar dissolves too fast and floods the dish with syrup.
- "A hot oven"The book gives no temperature; a hot oven is conventionally read as somewhere around 425-450F. At that heat the bake is short, only long enough for the sugar to dissolve into the released juice and begin to thicken. Left longer the fruit collapses and the sugar caramelises.
- The hinge: the drying, not the bakingThe oven stage does very little of the work. The candying happens over the following days as moisture leaves the fruit and the sugar concentrates in it. A low oven at 150-175F with the door ajar, or a dehydrator, does the same job as the Victorian airing cupboard or plate rack over the range.
- "Dry them separately"This most likely means laid out in a single layer with space between them, not touching. Fruit piled together steams and stays wet in the middle.
- Ripeness mattersUse apricots that are ripe but still firm. Soft fruit disintegrates in the sugar and produces jam rather than candied fruit.
- Watch for mouldFruit dried in a warm room for several days can spoil if the air is damp or still. It should feel tacky and firm, never squashy, and any furred or fermenting piece goes out. Finished halves keep in a sealed jar between sheets of paper.
- YieldA pound of apricots is about 8-10 fruit, giving that many candied fruits, enough for a dessert dish or a tin of sweets.
Candying was one of the oldest ways to hold summer fruit through an English winter, and the technique long predates the household manuals: sixteenth- and seventeenth-century receipt books describe "wet suckets" preserved in syrup and "dry suckets" finished as these apricots are, sugared and left to harden. Sugar was still an apothecary's commodity then, and the confectioner's craft was closer to medicine than dessert. By the time Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery appeared in the later nineteenth century, refined sugar had become cheap enough for an ordinary kitchen to candy fruit by the pound, and apricots in particular came from the trained trees on walled kitchen gardens, where they ripened in a glut over a week or two and had to be dealt with quickly. The brevity of the entry is typical of the book: it sits among hundreds of alphabetised fragments meant to jog the memory of a cook who had done the thing before, rather than teach it from nothing.