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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
Two methods for candying citron, one for the household and one copied from commercial practice. Both hinge on the same problem: raw citron rind is inedibly bitter, and everything before the sugar exists to draw that bitterness out.
- What citron isThis is Citrus medica, a thick-skinned citrus grown almost entirely for its peel — the fruit is nearly all pith with very little juice. It is not the "citron melon" of preserve recipes, and it is not the dried currant sold beside candied peel at Christmas. Fresh citron turns up in Italian and Jewish groceries in autumn; thick-pithed pomelo or grapefruit peel behaves similarly.
- The long soak is the whole recipeRaw citron rind is intensely bitter, and both methods spend nearly all their time drawing that out; the commercial text says outright that the months of brining are what removes the bitter principle. The household version reaches a similar end by repeated changes of water and boiling, and modern candying still relies on repeated soaking and blanching.
- AlumPotassium alum was the standard nineteenth-century firming agent; the recipe says only 'a little.' Food-grade alum is still sold, though modern preservers usually skip it: the long boil in syrup firms the peel adequately on its own, and excess alum leaves a metallic astringency.
- Citron leavesAdded for aroma and a faint green tint. Omit them if you have no tree; they contribute nothing structural.
- "A mild syrup" and "20° saccharometer""A mild syrup" and "20 degrees saccharometer" -- The first is a thin syrup, in the region of a cup of sugar to four cups of water. The saccharometer reading is a density scale, but which one is not stated: read as percent sugar it is about 20 percent by weight (roughly a cup and a quarter of sugar per quart of water), while on the Baume scale then common in confectionery it would be a considerably heavier syrup. Either way the point of starting weak is that a strong syrup shocks the peel and shrivels it; the sugar concentration is stepped up over the three weeks.
- Pound for poundSugar equal to the weight of the citron. The original does not say whether that is the raw fruit or the drained boiled fruit; weighing after boiling and draining is the safer reading.
- The brine is unmeasuredThe original gives no salt concentration. A brine too weak to preserve will simply spoil over five months at room temperature. If you attempt this stage, use a fully saturated brine (salt added until no more dissolves), keep the fruit submerged under a weight, and discard the batch at any sign of mould or off smell.
- Sun dryingDays of "hottest sunshine" assumes Florida in late summer, plus insect netting. A dehydrator at 130–135°F, or an oven at its lowest setting with the door cracked, does the same job in eight to twelve hours.
- The text breaks offThe commercial method is cut short mid-sentence in the source, apparently in the middle of a further twenty-four hours in the syrup. The finish that would normally follow is to lift the fruit out, drain it on racks, and dry it slowly until the surface is tacky rather than wet, with a final dusting or glaze of sugar.
- Yield and keepingThe peel loses water and takes up sugar, so the finished weight is in the same region as the fruit you started with, but do not count on a precise return. Stored airtight in a cool place, properly saturated candied peel keeps for a year or more; anything still soft and weeping was not carried far enough up the sugar ladder.
History: Citron is the oldest citrus in the Mediterranean, grown there since antiquity and valued for its peel and its ritual use as the etrog of the Jewish festival of Sukkot rather than for eating out of hand. Candied citron peel became the backbone of European fruitcakes, panforte and panettone, and by the late nineteenth century much of what reached American kitchens came from Corsica, Sicily and Leghorn, shipped in brine. That trade is the background to a recipe like this one appearing in the context of American fruit growing: Helen Harcourt, generally credited as the author of Florida Fruits and How to Raise Them, was writing for settlers being urged to plant subtropical crops that the United States was then importing, and citron was one of the perennial candidates. The method credited to her is headed 'commercial' in the text itself, and follows the Mediterranean trade process, months of salting included — a reminder that candied peel was an industrial product long before it was a home one.