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APRICOTS, TO DRY (a quick and easy method)
Pare, stone, and halve the fruit, then place it in a deep stone jar. Put the jar in a saucepan of boiling water over a good fire, and keep boiling until the fruit is quite tender. Lay the apricots on a sieve, that the juice may drain away, and afterwards put them on plates. Strew sifted sugar thickly over them, and put them in a warm place to dry, before storing them away. Time to boil the fruit, about half an hour.
This is a sugar-dried fruit, closer to a soft candied apricot than to the leathery dried fruit sold today. The method is a water bath: the jar of fruit never touches direct heat, so nothing scorches and the apricots keep their shape.
- The hinge: gentle heat, not a hard boilThe stone jar sits in boiling water, so the fruit cooks at about 100C without agitation. Do not be tempted to cook the apricots directly in a pan; they will break up and you will finish with jam rather than whole halves.
- Half an hour is for firm, underripe fruitHalf an hour suits firm, underripe fruit -- Preserving recipes of the period generally assume firm fruit rather than fully ripe. Ripe supermarket fruit is likely to be tender in 10 to 15 minutes; check at ten and stop as soon as a half yields to a skewer but still holds together.
- ParingApricot skins are thin and modern practice is usually to leave them on. If you want them off, drop the whole fruit in boiling water for 30 seconds and slip the skins rather than paring with a knife, which wastes flesh.
- A deep stone jarAny heatproof vessel that will stand in a saucepan works: a wide preserving jar, a pudding basin, or a stainless bowl. Sit it on a folded cloth or a trivet so it does not rattle on the pan base, and keep the water level at about two-thirds up the jar.
- Sifted sugarThis means fine sugar passed through a sieve, so caster or superfine. Granulated will not dissolve into the damp surface and will stay gritty.
- "A warm place to dry"In a period kitchen this meant the plate rack over the range or the mouth of a cooling oven. The modern equivalent is a dehydrator at 57-60C or an oven at its lowest setting with the door propped, for several hours until the surface is tacky but not wet.
- Don't skip the drainingJuice left on the halves dissolves the sugar coat and the fruit sours instead of drying. Drain on the sieve until the flow stops, then blot the cut faces before sugaring.
- StoringThese are semi-dried and still hold moisture, so they mould where fully dried fruit will not. Store in a sealed jar with a layer of sifted sugar between the layers, keep them cool, and use within a few weeks; refrigerate if the kitchen is warm.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities, and the finished weight will vary with how far you dry the fruit; expect a substantial loss of weight from the fresh apricots, partly offset by the sugar coating.
Apricots were a wall fruit in British gardens, trained against south-facing brick and ripening in a short late-summer rush that had to be dealt with all at once, which is why nineteenth-century books carry so many apricot entries: jam, cheese, marmalade, compote, candied and dried. Sugar-drying of this kind sits between preserving and confectionery. The fruit is softened, drained of its juice and then coated in sugar that draws out more moisture as it dries, giving something that keeps for weeks rather than days without the long syrup-steeping of true candied fruit. The recipe's own subtitle calls it "a quick and easy method", in contrast to candying proper, which involves repeated steeping in progressively heavier syrup. The water-bath jar is a familiar device for anything that needed gentle heat in the era before reliable low ovens: a domestic range gave heat you could not readily turn down, so cooks put a barrier of boiling water between the fire and the food.