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Candied Kumquat
The fruit may be left whole, halved, or quartered, the form deciding the time of cooking. The kumquats may be candied as for cherries, or first cooked till tender, then placed in a thick, boiling syrup, for fifteen minutes, placed in the sun to dry, and the process continued till sufficiently candied, when sugar may be sprinkled over them before packing away, though this may be omitted.
This is a note rather than a formula: it assumes you have already read the candied cherry method earlier in the book and know what "a thick syrup" means. Here is what the gaps need.
- The hinge: syrup strength rises in stagesCandying works by replacing the water in the fruit with sugar gradually. Start the fruit in a light syrup (roughly equal weights sugar and water) and on each successive day add sugar or boil the syrup down so it is heavier. Dropping tender fruit straight into a very heavy syrup can shrivel and toughen the peel.
- "Thick, boiling syrup"Most likely a syrup boiled to about the thread stage: it coats a spoon and forms a thin thread from the tip. The book gives no thermometer reading, so treat any figure as approximate.
- Cook till tender firstWhole kumquats need 20-30 minutes at a bare simmer in plain water before they will take syrup; halved or quartered fruit, 10-15. Prick whole fruit two or three times with a needle or they burst. The peel should yield easily to a fingernail — it will not soften further once sugar enters it.
- Fifteen minutes, then restFifteen minutes, then repeat -- The fifteen minutes in syrup is a single pass; the recipe then puts the fruit in the sun to dry before returning it to the syrup. Expect the cycle to be repeated several times over several days, until the fruit looks translucent to the centre; the recipe sets no number, only "till sufficiently candied."
- Sun-drying, replacedSun-drying needs consecutive hot dry days and screening from insects. A 150-170F oven with the door propped, or a dehydrator, does the same work in a few hours; drain the fruit on a rack first and stop when the surface is tacky rather than wet.
- Rolling in sugarThe optional sugar coating is not decoration alone — it absorbs surface moisture and keeps pieces from fusing in the box. Use granulated for a crystalline finish, superfine if you want it less gritty. Fruit left unsugared should be stored in a single layer between waxed paper.
- The leftover syrupWhat remains is a heavily kumquat-flavoured syrup. Do not discard it — it keeps in the refrigerator and is useful over cake or in drinks.
Kumquats reached American markets from southern China by way of nineteenth-century plant importers, and for decades they were sold as much as an ornament as a food. The fruit itself, tart flesh inside a sweet edible rind, sits oddly among citrus meant to be peeled. Candying was the obvious answer, since the whole fruit can go into the syrup and the peel is the best part of it. The kumquat is a near relation of citrus, and was for a time placed in a separate genus, Fortunella, though current treatments generally fold kumquats back into Citrus. The instruction to finish the fruit in the sun is a reminder of how much preserving still depended on weather: crystallised fruit was a several-day project timed to a dry spell, and the sugar sprinkled over at the end was insurance against a humid one.