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Apricots, to Dry
The apricots should be taken before they are quite ripe. Scald them, draw off the skin, divide and stone them. Place them in a dish, with their weight in sugar strewn over them, and let them remain twenty-four hours. Then put the whole into a preserving-pan, and simmer them very gently until they are clear. They must remain in the syrup for two days. It must then be drained from them, boiled, and poured over them, and they must remain in it two days more. It must then be drawn off, and used for flavouring or other purposes, and the apricots dusted with sugar and placed a little apart from each other in a cool oven to dry. They keep best in a tin box with writing-paper between the layers. The apricot syrup mixed with an equal quantity of brandy also makes an agreeable liquor. Time to make, six days.
This is candied fruit rather than dried fruit in the modern sense: the apricots are drawn slowly into a heavy syrup over several days, then dried only enough to stop them sticking. The six-day timetable is mostly waiting, and it cannot be compressed without the fruit collapsing.
- The hinge: gentle heat, long soaksThe point of the repeated steeping is osmotic — sugar moves into the fruit while water moves out, slowly enough that the flesh stays whole. Boiling the fruit hard at any stage will burst it and give you jam. The syrup alone is boiled; the apricots only ever simmer, and only until translucent.
- "Their weight in sugar"Equal weights, measured on a scale: 2 lb prepared fruit to 2 lb granulated sugar. This is not a ratio to reduce, as the sugar concentration is what preserves the finished apricots.
- Preserving-panA wide, shallow, heavy pan — traditionally unlined copper or brass. A broad stainless or enamelled cast-iron pan works; depth is the enemy, since a wide surface lets the syrup concentrate evenly without scorching the fruit at the bottom.
- A cool ovenNo temperature is given in the book; modern equivalents for a 'cool oven' are usually put somewhere around 200-225F (93-107C), with the door propped slightly ajar to let moisture escape. Such drying was often done in the falling heat of a range after cooking. A dehydrator at 135F (57C) will do the same job over several hours and is easier to control.
- Underripe fruit is deliberateFully ripe apricots have less pectin and softer walls, and they disintegrate in syrup. Firm fruit just short of ripeness holds its shape through the repeated soakings.
- Scalding and skinningThirty to sixty seconds in boiling water, then straight into cold, will lift the skins. Apricots are less obliging than peaches; a paring knife finishes any that resist.
- Writing-paperUncoated paper, used to keep the sticky layers apart. Baking parchment does the job better. Store in an airtight tin somewhere cool and dry, not the refrigerator, where the sugar will weep.
- The syrup and the brandyThe drained syrup is a genuine by-product worth keeping — use it over puddings or in ices. Mixed one to one with brandy it makes an apricot cordial, which should be bottled and kept as you would any home-made liqueur.
Candying fruit in successive baths of ever-stronger syrup is a very old European technique, described in English books as making a "dry sucket" — as opposed to a "wet sucket", fruit left in its syrup — from at least the sixteenth century. Cassell's compilers were writing for a household in which the still-room tradition had passed into the kitchen: preserving was still done at home, in season, against a winter with no fresh fruit. Apricots, native to Central and East Asia and long naturalised around the Mediterranean, were grown in Britain against south-facing walls and in glasshouses, and ripened all at once in a short July-to-August window, which is precisely the situation that makes a six-day preserving project worth the trouble. The instruction to keep the drained syrup, and to turn it into a cordial with brandy, is characteristic of the book's economy: nothing that cost sugar was thrown away.