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Cherries, Candied
Choose fine, sound, ripe cherries, take off the stalks, and wipe them with a soft cloth, then pour over them some syrup boiled ready to candy. Move them gently about, and, when cold, put them in a cool oven for half an hour to dry. Probable cost of cherries, 3d. to 6d. per pound. Half a pound of cherries, garnished with leaves, will make a small dish.
A short, old-fashioned glazing method rather than the multi-day sugar-strength candying used for commercial glacé cherries. Expect a crisp sugar shell over a fresh cherry, best eaten the same day.
- "Syrup boiled ready to candy"In Victorian sugar-boiling language this is usually taken to mean somewhere around the crack stage, short of caramel, though the term is used loosely in period texts. The recipe gives no proportions of sugar to water; boil undisturbed and test by dripping a little into cold water, looking for a brittle thread.
- A cool ovenIn modern terms this is a very low oven or a warming drawer, no more than gentle drying heat. Hotter than that will soften the sugar shell and stew the fruit rather than dry it.
- Stalks and moistureWiping matters more than it sounds. Surface water on the cherries will thin and cloud the syrup coating and can stop the shell setting cleanly.
- StonesThe recipe says nothing about pitting, so the stones stay in. Cutting the fruit open is likely to leak juice into the syrup and spoil the coating; keep them whole.
- Handling the hot syrupSugar at 300F is far hotter than boiling water and clings to skin. Turn the cherries with a fork or a dipping loop rather than fingers, and do not add cold fruit to the pan in a single mass, which drops the temperature and dulls the finish.
- KeepingThese are not preserved. True candied cherries are held in syrups of increasing strength over a week or more so sugar replaces the water in the fruit; a single dip only coats it. Serve within a day, before the fruit's moisture dissolves the shell.
- Yield and costThe recipe reckons half a pound of cherries to a small dish. The prices are pre-decimal British pence and are useful only as a period detail.
The recipe belongs among the sugar-work entries a late-Victorian kitchen was expected to manage: fruit dipped in boiled sugar for the dessert course or for garnishing creams and ices. The distinction between this quick dip and slow candying, in which fruit sits in progressively stronger syrups until its own moisture is displaced by sugar, was understood by confectioners of the period, and the slow method is what produced the keeping glace cherries sold by grocers. The recipe's note of cost per pound reflects a book written for households that priced their dessert as carefully as their joints of meat.