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Orange Chips
Take the rinds of some large oranges. Cut into quarters, and weigh them. Boil them in water until they are so tender that they can be easily pierced with a fork, drain them well, and spread them in the sun or before the fire to dry. Take one pound and a half of sugar to two pounds of orange rind. Clarify the sugar, pour it upon the rind, and leave it for twenty-four hours. Strain of the syrup, boil it until it is thick, and pour it boiling over the orange-rind. Leave it for two days, then boil it again, and repeat this until the sugar is all used. Put the chips on a sieve in the sun, and leave them until they are dry. Time, a week or more. Probable cost, oranges, 1d. each.
This is candied orange peel by the slow repeated-syrup method, where the sugar concentration is raised in stages over a week or more rather than all at once. The stages are the point: dumping the peel into heavy syrup at the start toughens it.
- Weigh the peel firstThe whole recipe is proportional: 1½ lb sugar to 2 lb of boiled rind, so roughly 3 parts sugar to 4 parts peel by weight. Large oranges yield surprisingly little rind, and 2 lb of peel means the skins of a good many oranges. Scaling down to 8 oz peel and 6 oz sugar gives a manageable batch.
- Clarify the sugarIn Victorian usage this means dissolving the sugar in water and bringing it to a boil with a little beaten egg white, then skimming off the scum that rises and carries the impurities with it. Modern refined sugar needs none of this: dissolve it in enough water to make a syrup and skim only if you wish.
- The first boilBoiling the quartered rinds in plain water until a fork goes through easily will typically take upwards of half an hour; changing the water once or twice is a common modern practice, though the recipe does not ask for it. The plain boil is what softens the pith and takes off the worst of the bitterness.
- Why the syrup is strained off and reboiledEach reboil drives off water and concentrates the syrup, so the sugar migrates into the peel gradually instead of shocking and shrivelling it. Rushing straight to a heavy syrup gives hard, leathery chips with a raw centre.
- "Strain of the syrup"A printer's slip for "off." Pour the syrup away from the peel into a pan, boil it down, then pour it back over the peel.
- Drying without sunFew kitchens can rely on a week of sun or an open fire. A rack in a very low oven, 120–150F with the door propped ajar, dries the chips in three to six hours; a dehydrator on its lowest setting does the same overnight. They should be tacky, not sticky, when done.
- Finishing and keepingToss the dried chips in caster sugar to stop them clinging together. Stored airtight in a cool cupboard they keep for months; any residual moisture is what causes mould, so err on the side of drier.
- Cost note"1d. each" is one old penny per orange, from a currency of twelve pence to the shilling and twenty shillings to the pound, retired in 1971. It is a period price marker, not a modern guide.
Candied citrus peel is one of the oldest sugar confections in the European kitchen, descending from the medieval apothecary's practice of preserving fruit and roots in syrup as much for medicine as for pleasure, and it survived into the Victorian household as a way of using the rind of an expensive imported fruit rather than throwing it away. The peel was a store-cupboard staple, chopped into cakes and puddings or eaten as a sweetmeat with dessert. The week-long schedule of standing and reboiling reflects a kitchen with a permanently warm range and no hurry, and the recipe carries a price note of a penny an orange.