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Parisian Sweets
Take equal quantities of nut meats, figs, dates, prunes or raisins, put them through a food chopper. Roll into small balls and then roll these in granulated sugar.
An uncooked confection of the type that filled the candy chapters of interwar household books. The whole recipe hinges on getting the fruit-to-nut ratio right: too much fruit and the mixture will not hold a ball without weeping sugar syrup, too many nuts and it crumbles.
- "Equal quantities"Read this by weight, not volume, since nut meats and dried fruit pack very differently. The phrasing is ambiguous: it may mean equal weights of each item listed (so nuts as one part in three or four), or nuts equal to the fruit in total. Either reading works; the proportions are forgiving.
- Food chopperThe hand-cranked food chopper clamped to a table edge extruded a coarse, sticky ribbon. A food processor does the same job in short pulses — run it too long and the nut oil breaks out and the mixture turns greasy. Grind the nuts first, then add the fruit.
- Pits and stemsThe original assumes you know to do this. Stem the figs, pit the dates and prunes, and check raisins for stray stems; a single date pit will damage a processor blade.
- Nut choiceWalnuts, pecans and almonds all work. Blanched almonds give the palest, most "Parisian" result; walnuts are the most assertive.
- RollingThe paste sticks to warm hands. Chill the ground mixture for 20 minutes and dampen your palms lightly, or wear thin gloves. The recipe specifies only "small balls"; about ¾ inch is a convenient size.
- The sugar coatGranulated sugar tends to dissolve into the moist fruit surface and the balls turn tacky before long. If they are to be kept more than a day or two, use superfine sugar or a mix of confectioners' sugar and cocoa, or re-roll before serving.
- Yield and keepingA pound of combined fruit and nuts makes roughly 30 to 36 small balls. Store in a tin between layers of waxed paper, cool and dry, for up to two weeks.
Fruit-and-nut pastes ground together and rolled in sugar are very old, and comparable confections built on dates, figs and almonds are found in medieval and Middle Eastern cookery. The name attached here looks like period marketing: "Parisian" was often used in American cookbooks of this era as a signal of refinement rather than a claim of origin, and similar mixtures appear elsewhere under names such as "fruit balls." What makes the recipe characteristic of its era is the food chopper, the clamp-on hand mill that made an uncooked candy possible without a candy thermometer, a sugar boil, or any fuel at all.