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Recipes To Dry with Sugar

Citron is useless in its natural state. For keeping for home use or market it must be dried and this should be done just before the fruit reaches maturity: while still green yet well filled out. Quarter it and place in fresh water a day and a night. Drain and replace water several times, then boil for forty minutes with a little alum and handful of citron leaves. Drain from this and boil in a mild syrup forty minutes longer. At the end of this time add sugar, pound for pound (with weight of citron itself). Let this boil five or six minutes, then remove fruit and cook syrup till thicker. Dip the fruit in it again and boil as before, and once more repeat the process before placing the citron in the sun to dry. Fill the hollow sides with sugar and let fruit remain in the hottest sunshine for as many days as required to dry thoroughly, filling the hollows every few days with sugar.

COMMERCIAL CANDIED CITRON (Helen Harcourt) Cut the fruit into halves or quarters (according to size), then pack it in cask or tub of brine, having first cleaned out the pulp, and leave it for a month; then renew the salt water and let the citron lie in it for four or five months, or as much longer as you choose; this long process is necessary to eliminate the bitter principle from the rind, which otherwise it is not possible to eliminate entirely. Next boil the fruit in fresh water until a fork will easily pass through it; it usually takes an hour and a half to reach this point. Then put it in cold, fresh water, to remain there for at least twenty-four hours, when it will have turned to that light green colour which we have learned to associate with candied citron. The next step is to drain the fruit, place it in earthen jars, and pour over it hot syrup of white sugar at 20° sacchrometer; cover it entirely and let it stand for three weeks, but the syrup must be poured off twice a week, boiled, skimmed, and more sugar added each time until the syrup is a little thicker than it was at first boiling; turn it back over the fruit at boiling point. The three weeks elapsed, put the citron in a vessel containing the syrup, with all the sugar it can dissolve; let it boil for ten minutes; and then for twenty-four hours keep