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Apricot Paste
Wash three quarters of a cup of dried apricots, add to them half a cup of walnut meats and three quarters of a cup of fresh cocoanut; put them all through the food chopper. Add a teaspoonful of grated orange peel and the same amount of lemon peel. Moisten with a tablespoonful of lemon juice.
Mix and knead well and roll out on a sugared board. Cut in rounds with a small cutter, or make into balls.
An uncooked confection that depends entirely on texture: the fruit and nuts have to be ground fine enough to bind themselves without any syrup or egg white. Everything else is detail.
- Food chopperThis is a hand-cranked meat grinder; for a paste you would want one of the finer plates. A food processor works, but pulse rather than run it continuously, or the walnut oil breaks out and the paste turns greasy. A meat grinder attachment gives the closest result.
- Fresh cocoanutGrated meat from a whole coconut, which is moist and mildly sweet. Packaged sweetened flake is much drier and much sweeter; if you use it, cut back nothing else and expect a sweeter candy. Frozen grated coconut, thawed and drained, is the nearest substitute.
- Dried apricotsTurkish or California halves, pliable rather than leathery. If yours are hard, soak them ten minutes in hot water and pat thoroughly dry, or the paste will not come together and the grinder will jam.
- Sugared boardDust the board with sugar the way you would flour a pastry board. The recipe does not say which sugar; a fine or confectioners' sugar gives a smooth coating, while granulated stays visible as grains on the surface.
- The moisteningA tablespoon of lemon juice is a starting point, not a rule. Add it a teaspoon at a time; too much and the paste slumps and will not hold a cut edge.
- KneadingKnead longer than seems necessary, three or four minutes, until the mass is uniform and slightly tacky. This is what makes the candy hold together, since there is no cooked sugar doing the work.
- Yield and keepingThe recipe gives no yield; from these quantities expect a few dozen small rounds or balls depending on the cutter. Left uncovered on a rack for a few hours they firm up usefully; store them layered between waxed paper in a tin, or refrigerate if you want to keep them longer.
Uncooked fruit-and-nut pastes of this kind were a familiar feature of early twentieth-century American candy chapters. The technique itself is far older and travels widely: ground dried fruit bound by its own sugars is the principle behind Middle Eastern and North African date and apricot sweets, and behind the pressed fruit pastes of southern Europe. The appeal here is a candy that requires a grinder, a board and no heat at all, which in a pre-air-conditioning summer was the entire argument.