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Pomelo Strips Candied
The rind of the pomelo has a most attractive and distinctive flavour when candied. First cut and place in salt and fresh water till sufficient of the bitterness is withdrawn (not all of it), then proceed as for Orange Chips.
A two-line instruction that assumes you have already read the orange chips recipe. The hinge is the salted soak: it is what makes citrus rind edible rather than harsh, and stopping it short of complete blandness is the whole point.
- Which fruit is meantIn books of this period "pomelo" is used both for the true pomelo (Citrus maxima, the large pale ancestor of the grapefruit) and for the grapefruit itself. Either works; grapefruit rind is thinner and needs a shorter soak, true pomelo has a very thick white pith and takes longer.
- The salt soakCover the cut strips with heavily salted cold water and leave some hours, then drain and stand in fresh water, changing it two or three times. The recipe gives no timings, so taste a strip before you stop: the instruction to leave some bitterness is deliberate, since fully leached peel tastes of little but sugar.
- CuttingQuarter the fruit, peel away the rind in sheets, and cut into strips; the recipe specifies no width, and something around a quarter inch is a reasonable choice. Leave a good layer of the white pith attached; it is what gives candied peel its body.
- What "proceed as for Orange Chips" meansThe orange chips recipe is not given on this page, so the method has to be taken from it. The usual procedure of this kind is to simmer the drained strips in plain water until easily pierced, then cook them slowly in a sugar syrup until translucent and the syrup is thick, lift out, drain on a rack, and dry before storing.
- Heat and syrupKeep the syrup at a bare simmer. A hard boil drives the sugar concentration up faster than it can penetrate the rind, and you get strips that are tough inside and sticky outside.
- Drying and keepingThe recipe does not say how to dry the strips. Air-dry on a rack for a day, or set in an oven at its lowest setting (on most ovens somewhere between 150 and 200F) with the door ajar for an hour or two. Roll in granulated sugar and keep in a tin; properly dried peel keeps well.
- YieldNo quantities are given, and the yield will vary with the size of the fruit and the thickness of the pith. Reserve the leftover syrup for cakes or drinks.
Candied citrus peel belongs to the older tradition of household thrift, in which the part of the fruit nobody would eat raw was turned into a confection. Grapefruit and pomelo were arguably still relative novelties in Anglo-American kitchens when books like this were written: commercial grapefruit growing in Florida expanded rapidly around the turn of the twentieth century. That is why the instruction here is so brief. Orange chips were a familiar confection with a settled method, so the writer only had to note what makes pomelo different: its rind is far more bitter, and it needs brining before it can join the standard procedure. The advice to withdraw the bitterness but not all of it is the sound judgment of someone who has tasted the over-leached version.