Bonbons
Take fresh candied orange rind, or citron. Scrape off the sugar that adheres to it; then cut into small squares. Boil some sugar to the consistency of candy, and with a fork take up the squares and dip them singly into the sugar. Then place them on a dish rubbed with a very small quantity of salad-oil. When quite cold, put them into dry tin boxes, with paper between each layer.
A two-ingredient sweet: candied peel jacketed in hard sugar. Everything depends on how far the sugar is boiled, which the original leaves to the eye.
- "The consistency of candy"In nineteenth-century confectionery this generally indicates one of the high, hard degrees of boiled sugar, roughly what is now called hard crack (about 300-310F/150-155C), where a drop of syrup in cold water shatters rather than bends. Sugar taken off appreciably below that will stay tacky and the pieces are apt to stick together.
- A workable syrupThe original gives no quantities. A common modern proportion is roughly two cups sugar to two-thirds cup water, with a spoonful of glucose or corn syrup to guard against crystallising. Wash sugar crystals off the pan sides with a wet brush and do not stir once it boils.
- Candied peel todayCommercial candied orange peel and citron are sold both dry-diced and syrup-packed, and often heavily sugared. Blot them dry after scraping off the loose sugar; surface moisture makes the hot syrup sputter and can seize the coating.
- DippingA dipping fork or a two-tined cocktail fork is easier than a table fork. Keep the syrup over the lowest possible heat while you work, since it thickens fast and will set in the pan.
- The oiled dish"Salad-oil" is plain olive or other neutral oil, used only as a release agent. A silicone mat or a sheet of parchment does the same job with no flavour at all.
- Humidity is the enemyBoiled-sugar coatings pull water out of the air and go sticky within hours on a damp day. Make these in dry weather and store them sealed, as the original directs, with paper between the layers.
Candied citrus peel was a preserving technique long before it was a confection: boiling fruit rind in successively stronger syrup drove out water and let expensive imported oranges, lemons and citrons keep for months. Citron, the thick-skinned Citrus medica grown chiefly for its peel, was a standing item in nineteenth-century grocers' lists mainly for cakes and puddings. Coating the squares in hard-cracked sugar turns a baking ingredient into a sweetmeat, and it is the kind of small, thrifty transformation household compendiums of this period liked to record. The word bonbon is French nursery talk, a doubling of bon, "good", and by the late 1800s it covered almost any small dipped or coated confection.