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Fruit, to Candy
Make a syrup with one pound of good sugar and half a tea-cupful of water. When boiling, put in any preserved fruits, and stir gently until they get crystallised; then take them out, and dry them in an oven or before the fire, but do not let them get coloured.
This is the final finishing stage for fruit that has already been through a sugar preserve — the thin white crystalline coat you see on old-fashioned candied cherries and angelica. The whole thing turns on deliberately making the syrup grain, which is the opposite of what you do for almost any other sugar work.
- The hinge: make the syrup grainThe original gives no temperature, only "when boiling"; modern practice for this kind of graining is around soft-ball. Put the fruit in and stir gently until the surface clouds and turns opaque and sandy. Ordinary candy-making tells you to avoid crystallisation at all costs; here it is the entire point, so use a pan and spoon that are clean but dry, and do not wipe down the sides.
- Half a tea-cupful of waterA Victorian teacup runs about 5-6 fl oz, so this is roughly 2 1/2 to 3 fl oz — about a third of a cup — for a pound of sugar. The exact figure barely matters, since you are boiling most of it off anyway; start at the lower end.
- "Preserved fruits"Not jam and not fresh fruit. This means whole or halved fruit already saturated with sugar over several days in graduated syrups — glacé cherries, apricots, pineapple, citrus peel, angelica. Fresh fruit dropped into this syrup will simply weep water and dissolve the crystals.
- Drain firstLift the preserved fruit from its storage syrup and let it drain on a rack until barely tacky. Surplus wet syrup carried into the pan will dilute the boiling sugar and the coating will go clear and sticky instead of frosted.
- "Do not let them get coloured"In the original this attaches to the drying. Dry the fruit at no more than 150-175F — a barely warm oven with the door propped open, or a dehydrator — and take the syrup off before any straw tint appears. Above that the sugar starts to caramelise and the whites turn beige.
- Drying timeExpect one to three hours on a wire rack, turning once, until the coating is dry and chalky to the touch rather than tacky. "Before the fire" means a warm, moving-air spot; a cool oven with the door ajar is the closer equivalent than a sealed modern oven.
- Yield and keepingKeeping -- The syrup can be reboiled once with a splash of water if it sets too hard mid-batch. Store the finished pieces in a tin between layers of parchment, not airtight with anything moist, or the crystal coat will redissolve.
Candying in this sense belongs to the older confectioner's vocabulary, where "wet suckets" were fruits kept in syrup and "dry suckets" were the same fruits finished with a crisp sugar coat for the dessert table or the sweetmeat dish. The technique is documented in English household books from the seventeenth century onward and passed more or less intact into Victorian confectionery, where candied cherries, pears, apricots and angelica were staples of the ornamental dessert and of rich cakes. It is a finishing method rather than a dish, and can be set out in a single paragraph that assumes the reader already has a jar of preserved fruit in the store cupboard, preserving the summer glut in sugar being domestic work rather than a specialist trade.