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Clear Fruit Candy
Instead of using water, as above, use some tart fruit juice and let cook without stirring till it strings from the spoon.
This is a variation line, not a standalone recipe: it assumes the plain boiled-sugar candy printed above it, with tart fruit juice standing in for the water. A few notes on making it work.
- The hinge is the acidFruit juice does more than flavour here — its acid inverts part of the sucrose as it boils, which is what keeps the finished candy glassy instead of grainy. That is also why the instruction says not to stir: agitation on the pan sides seeds crystals the acid is working to prevent.
- "Strings from the spoon" is vagueRead literally, a syrup that spins a thread off the spoon is thread stage, around 230F, which sets soft and sticky rather than clear and hard; older spoon tests, however, were not consistent, and the writer may have meant a later stage. For a candy you can crack, a thermometer and a target of 300-310F is safer than the spoon.
- Use clear, strained juiceCurrant, cranberry, sour cherry and lemon all work. Strain through cloth first; pulp and sediment scorch at high temperature and cloud the candy. Very high-pectin juices can set to a jelly-like mass instead of a brittle.
- ProportionThe line implies simply putting juice where the base recipe put water. The quantity cannot be checked here, since that base recipe is not on this page; a quarter cup or so of liquid per cup of sugar is a common ratio for a hard candy syrup.
- Colour and flavour lossHigh heat is hard on fruit flavour and colour, and past the hard-crack range the sugar itself starts to take on colour. Reserving a spoonful of juice or a little grated zest to stir in off the heat is one way round it.
- Pan and pourUse a heavy pan with plenty of headroom. Pour onto a buttered marble slab or a silicone mat, score into squares as it firms, and break when cold.
- Yield and storageStorage -- Wrap the pieces or hold them in an airtight tin; the inverted sugar that keeps the candy clear also makes it eager to pick up humidity and go tacky.
"Clear candy" was the nineteenth-century household name for what a confectioner would call boiled sugar work — the barley-sugar and lemon-drop family, cooked to the crack and poured out to set glassy. Before commercial flavouring extracts were cheap and reliable, tart fruit juice was the obvious way to flavour it, and cooks noticed that acid juices gave a clearer, less crumbly result; the chemistry of sugar inversion was only explained later, but the practical rule of adding something sour, whether lemon juice, vinegar or cream of tartar, was already standard.