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APRICOTS, TO DRY (French method)
Take some sound but not over-rip apricots: wipe them and weigh them; make a hole with a knife at one end, and remove the stone without dividing the fruit. Put them into cold water, and simmer until they are quite tender. Take an equal quantity, by weight, of sugar, and boil it in water, allowing a cupful to each pound. When the scum rises, put in the cooked apricots, and let them remain until they look quite clear; then put all into a jar, and let it remain until the next day, when the syrup must be drained off, boiled for five or ten minutes, and poured again over the fruit, to remain another twenty-four hours. This process must be repeated three times. Then the liquor must be drawn from them for the last time, and the apricots place separately on dishes, and dried very slowly. Time to make, five days.
This is candied fruit under another name: a five-day cycle of steeping in progressively heavier syrup, then slow drying. The method is sound, but almost everything about the timing and the drying stage needs translating.
- The hinge: raise the syrup slowlyThe whole point of repeating the drain-boil-pour cycle three times is that each boiling drives off water and concentrates the syrup, so sugar moves into the fruit gradually. Dropping apricots straight into heavy syrup makes them shrivel and turn leathery. Do not shorten the cycle.
- "A cupful to each pound"Read this as roughly 8 fl oz of water per pound of sugar (the nineteenth-century "cupful" was not a standardised measure), with sugar weight equal to the weight of the apricots as weighed before stoning. For 2 lb of apricots that is 2 lb sugar and about 2 cups water.
- Simmer the fruit briefly"Simmer until quite tender" in a modern pan may take only a few minutes once the water is up; test the fruit rather than timing it. The recipe needs the apricots whole so the syrup cycle has something to work on. Keep the water barely trembling.
- Removing the stone wholeSlide a thin knife or a chopstick in at the stem end and lever the stone out. Use fruit that is sound and not over-ripe, as instructed; anything soft will tear.
- The jarAny non-reactive bowl or crock will do. Boiling syrup should not go into a cold glass jar, and it must never go into a bare metal bowl that reacts with acid. Warm ceramic or stainless is right.
- Drying "very slowly"Probably a cooling oven or a warm larder; the recipe's stated five-day total leaves only about a day for this stage. A dehydrator at 135F, or an oven at its lowest setting (150-170F) with the door propped, gets there in 8-14 hours. Turn the fruit once or twice; it is done when tacky and no longer wet, not brittle.
- Don't waste the syrupThe drained syrup is heavily apricot-flavoured and worth keeping refrigerated for poaching fruit or sweetening drinks. It is thick enough to crystallise if left in a cold place.
- Yield and keepingTwo pounds of fresh apricots gives a considerably smaller quantity of candied fruit, though the exact yield varies with the fruit and how far the drying is taken. Roll in caster sugar to stop them sticking and store in an airtight tin with parchment between layers, cool and dark, for several months.
Drying fruit in sugar rather than sun is the confectioner's craft the French call fruits confits, and the technique of steeping in a syrup strengthened by boiling a little each day was long practised in France, though English confectionery books describe closely similar methods as well. Apt and Carpentras in Provence built a trade on exactly this, candying the apricots, cherries and melons of the surrounding orchards, and the town of Apt is still generally described as the capital of candied fruit. Cassell's, compiled for English middle-class households in the later nineteenth century, labels the method "French"; the book does not say why.