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Preserved Limes
Place the limes in boiling water and keep them cooking at this temperature until tender enough to pierce readily, when place in fresh water and let just come to boiling point. Have ready a syrup made as for ices (see Introductory Recipes) and when the limes are ready dash cold water over them and drain on a cloth, laying another over them. Then place in the boiling syrup and cook gently for twenty minutes when remove and let fruit stand in the syrup over night. Heat next day, letting boil and stand (in syrup) an hour several times after repeating the boiling. Then remove limes from the syrup to heated jars and after cooking down the syrup till quite thick (add more sugar if necessary) pour over the fruit and seal.
CHAPTER XIX
A slow candying method: the limes are softened in water first, then brought up gradually through repeated heatings in a sugar syrup so the fruit plumps instead of shrivelling. Nothing here is difficult, but it wants three days of intermittent attention.
- The hinge: raise the sugar slowlyThe point of boiling, standing, and reboiling is to let the syrup penetrate at the same rate the fruit gives up water. Dropping limes straight into a heavy syrup, or thickening it too fast, collapses and toughens the peel.
- "Syrup made as for ices"This refers to a syrup recipe in the book's introductory section, which is not given here; make up enough sugar syrup to cover the fruit completely.
- First boilingWhole limes need 30 to 60 minutes in plain boiling water before a skewer goes in easily, depending on size and thickness of skin. Changing the water once or twice reduces bitterness; the original's second fresh-water heating may serve the same end, though it does not say so.
- The clothDraining between two cloths is only to get the surface dry so the syrup is not diluted. A rack and a tea towel do the same job.
- Timing the repeatsThe recipe runs over two days: a first cooking and an overnight stand, then a next-day cycle of boiling and standing an hour, repeated 'several times.' The limes are done when they look translucent right through to the centre.
- Finishing the syrup"Quite thick" is judged by eye: reduce until the syrup sheets from a spoon. Any thinner and the preserve weeps in the jar; much thicker and it will crystallise.
- SealingPouring hot syrup into heated jars and screwing the lid down is open-kettle canning, and it is no longer considered a safe seal — the recipe gives no processing time or temperature. Treat the result as a refrigerator preserve, or follow a current tested process for candied or preserved citrus.
Preserving citrus whole in heavy syrup is one of the oldest sugar techniques in the European kitchen, descended from the medieval and Renaissance trade in candied peel and "succade" -- an English word for citron and orange put up this way, in use by the early modern period. Limes reached British and American cooks largely through the West Indies, where they were grown for juice and, in the nineteenth century, for the naval ration. The repeated boil-and-stand method is the same one used for candied ginger and for crystallised fruits, and it survives essentially unchanged in confectionery work today.