Home › Cookery › Candied Fruit
Candied Fruit
Preserve the fruit, then dip it in sugar boiled to a candied thickness, and dry it. Grapes and some other fruits may be dipped in uncooked.
A two-sentence recipe that assumes you already keep preserved fruit in the pantry and know the stages of boiled sugar by eye. Both assumptions need filling in.
- "Preserve the fruit" firstThis is not candying from raw. The fruit is expected to have been simmered through in heavy syrup beforehand — the book's own preserving chapter — then drained and dried on racks until the surface is tacky rather than wet. Dipping a wet, syrupy fruit into boiling sugar will make it seize and weep.
- "Candied thickness" means hard crack"Candied thickness" -- The book gives no test, but in period sugar-boiling terms this points to the crack/candy stage, judged by dropping a thread of syrup into cold water and seeing whether it snapped clean. On a modern thermometer that is roughly 300-310F; boiled short of that the coating tends to stay sticky.
- Stop the sugar from colouringAt hard crack the syrup is seconds away from caramel. Take the pan off the heat the moment it hits temperature and set the base briefly in cold water to arrest it, then work fast — the syrup thickens as it cools and one reheat is about all it tolerates before it darkens.
- Sugar alone will crystallisePlain sugar and water boiled to this stage often grains in the pan. A spoonful of glucose or corn syrup, or a few drops of lemon juice, per pound of sugar keeps it clear. Nineteenth-century cooks used cream of tartar for the same reason.
- Dipping grapes uncookedThe likeliest reading is that the fruit goes in raw, skipping the preserving step, rather than that the sugar is uncooked. If you dip raw fruit, dry the skins thoroughly and keep the dip brief; thin-skinned grapes fare badly in very hot syrup.
- DryingSet the dipped pieces on oiled parchment or a wire rack, not on a plate, or the pooled syrup welds them down. A warm dry room for several hours, or an oven at its lowest setting with the door ajar, will set the shell. Humidity is the enemy; on a damp day the coating never fully hardens.
- KeepingBoiled-sugar coatings are hygroscopic. Store in a tin between layers of waxed paper, never in the refrigerator, and expect a week or two at best before the shell begins to soften. Sugar-frosted grapes are a same-day proposition.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, places candying at the end of a long preserving sequence rather than treating it as a technique in its own right — which may account for the brevity. Candying fruit in boiled sugar is a very old confectioner's craft, associated in English cookery with the medieval and Tudor banqueting course, when sugar was costly enough that preserved and encrusted fruits served as display as much as dessert. By the 1870s American households had cheaper refined sugar and glass jars, and preserving had shifted from a luxury art towards routine autumn work. The instruction about dipping fruit uncooked sits alongside the parallel tradition of frosted fruit, which appears in period books as a centrepiece garnish and required no more equipment than egg white and a bowl of sugar.