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Greengages, to Candy
Make a syrup of a pound of sugar boiled with half a pint of water. Put the greengages, before they are quite ripe, in this, and boil for a few minutes till they are tender, but unbroken. Take them out, drain them, and sift pounded loaf sugar over them until they look quite white. Put them on dishes in a cool oven, and keep turning them about, and sifting more sugar over them, until they are dry. Time, about fifteen minutes to boil the fruit. Probable cost of greengages, when plentiful, 6d. per quart.
A straightforward wet-candying of plums, with one caveat: the stated fifteen minutes covers the boiling only, and the drying stage will occupy most of your afternoon.
- The hinge: pick underripe fruitThe instruction "before they are quite ripe" is the whole recipe. Fully ripe greengages collapse in hot syrup and you end up with jam. Choose fruit that is still firm and faintly green at the stem, and prick each one once or twice with a needle so the skins do not burst.
- MeasuresA pound of sugar is about 2 1/4 cups. Cassell's half-pint is an imperial one, 10 fl oz, so use 1 1/4 cups water. Dissolve the sugar fully over gentle heat before the fruit goes in, so the syrup does not crystallise.
- Pounded loaf sugarLoaf sugar was a hard cone broken up and pounded in a mortar; sifted fine, the result is close to what we call caster or superfine sugar. Ordinary granulated sugar is coarser and will give a less even white bloom.
- A cool ovenAround 200-225F, or the lowest setting your oven offers, with the door propped slightly ajar so moisture escapes. A dehydrator at 130-140F works as well and needs less watching.
- Drying timeExpect several hours, not fifteen minutes, turning and re-dusting with sugar every half hour or so; depending on the fruit it may need longer, or a second spell in the oven. The fruit is done when the surface is dry and no longer tacky to a fingertip.
- GreengagesThese are Reine Claude plums, small, round and green-gold. They appear briefly in late summer. Small firm damsons or any dense yellow plum candy the same way, though nothing else has quite the honeyed flavour.
- Do not waste the syrupWhat remains in the pan is a well-flavoured plum syrup. Strain it and keep it refrigerated for puddings or drinks; it will thicken considerably as it cools.
- Yield and keepingA quart of greengages, roughly 1 1/2 lb, gives perhaps 25 to 35 candied fruits depending on size. Layer them between sheets of parchment in a tin, not an airtight jar, and keep them somewhere dry; sealed in humidity they weep and turn sticky within days.
The greengage is a plum brought into English gardens in the early eighteenth century and named, traditionally, for Sir William Gage of Hengrave in Suffolk, whose garden is generally credited with popularising it in Britain; in France the same fruit is the Reine Claude, after the queen consort of Francois I. Candying was one of the standard ways a Victorian household preserved a glut of soft fruit that would not travel or keep, and the price note here, sixpence a quart "when plentiful", shows why the effort was worth making: greengages arrive all at once, ripen fast, and rot faster. The double process of boiling in syrup and then drying under repeated dustings of sugar belongs to the older confectioner's tradition, the same technique that produced candied peel, angelica and the crystallised fruits sold at Christmas.