Home › The Lemon › Orange Flowers Candied
Orange Flowers Candied
The flowers may be placed at once in boiling water or, as sometimes preferred, soaked in cold water for twentyfour hours, this poured off and fresh, boiling water substituted. Let the flowers boil a few minutes, then remove carefully and lightly pour over them cold water. Drain and place on cotton or linen cloth, sprinkling over them twice their weight of powdered sugar. Spread then on platters and let stand in a shady place for ten days or less that the sugar may be thoroughly absorbed, when place in sun or cool oven or dryer to dry. Pack away with layers of powdered sugar.
A sugar-cure rather than a cooked syrup: the blossoms are blanched, buried in dry sugar until they give up their water, then dried. It is slow but needs almost no equipment.
- Sourcing the flowersUse blossoms from a sweet or sour orange grown without systemic pesticides — supermarket citrus is not sold in flower, so this means your own tree or a trusted grower. Pick in the morning when just open, and pull off the green calyx and stem, which stay bitter.
- The 24-hour cold soakThe recipe offers this as an alternative rather than a requirement: the flowers 'may be placed at once in boiling water or, as sometimes preferred, soaked in cold water for twenty-four hours.' No reason is given; a long soak is usually a way of drawing off bitterness, though delicate blossoms will slump in a full day of water.
- "Boil a few minutes"Keep it brief: a couple of minutes is enough, and the cold water poured over immediately afterwards stops the cooking. Boiled longer, thin petals go to rags.
- Twice their weight of sugarWeigh the drained flowers and use exactly double in superfine or powdered sugar. This is the hinge of the recipe: the sugar has to be in enough excess to pull the water out and hold the mixture above the range where mould grows.
- "A shady place"A dry, airy room at normal room temperature, out of direct light so the petals keep their colour. Cover loosely against insects but do not seal — trapped moisture is what spoils the batch. Turn or re-sprinkle if you see wet sugar pooling, and discard if you smell fermentation.
- "Cool oven or dryer"The book gives no temperature. Use the oven's lowest setting with the door propped, or a dehydrator on its lowest setting, for a few hours until the petals are dry and brittle at the edges. Gentle heat is the point: too much and the floral aroma cooks off.
- Yield and storagePacked in powdered sugar in a tightly closed jar, as the recipe directs, they keep well; the perfumed sugar left behind is worth as much as the flowers, on cakes or in tea.
- Using themBest treated as a garnish and a confection: scatter on custards, iced cakes or almond pastries, where the perfume is not cooked away.
Candied orange blossom belongs to the long Mediterranean tradition of preserving citrus in every part — peel, juice, leaf and flower — that reached Europe with Arab horticulture and became a staple of Sicilian, Provençal and Levantine confectionery. The town of Grasse and the orchards around Seville built trades on the flower itself, distilling it for orange-flower water and neroli oil and candying the surplus; the sugared blossoms were sold as a sweetmeat and used to decorate wedding cakes and pastries. Orange flowers were something a Florida or California reader might genuinely have had in the yard in quantity. The dry-sugar method here, with no syrup and no thermometer, asks only for time and a dry room.