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Orange Conserves
Cut the peel in long, thin strips, and stew in water till all bitterness is extracted. Drain off this water and stew again in a thick syrup, allowing one pound sugar to each pound peel. Put away in a cool place for flavoring puddings, pies, etc.
This is candied orange peel in syrup, written for cooks who kept a crock of it on hand as a flavoring rather than a confection. The instructions assume knowledge the book does not spell out.
- The hinge: change the waterThe hinge: the water. "Stew in water till all bitterness is extracted" reads as one water in this text, but the usual practice is repeated blanching — bring the strips to a boil in fresh water and drain, two or three times over, tasting a strip each round; a single pot of water becomes bitter itself and re-seasons the peel.
- Choose the fruitThick-skinned, unwaxed oranges give the best strips. Scrub the outside first, and pare away most of the spongy white pith, which holds the harshest bitterness and turns woolly in syrup.
- "A thick syrup"Equal weights sugar and peel, as the recipe directs, with just enough water to dissolve the sugar. Simmer gently until the syrup thickens and the peel turns translucent; the recipe gives no thermometer reading, so go by look, allowing roughly 45 minutes to an hour at a bare simmer.
- Low and slowHard boiling toughens the peel and can crystallize the syrup before the strips have candied through. Keep it just barely bubbling and stir little once the sugar has dissolved.
- "A cool place"A nineteenth-century larder would have been considerably cooler than a modern kitchen, perhaps 50-55F. Pack the peel and its syrup into a clean jar and keep it in the refrigerator, where it will hold for months; the sugar does the preserving, but this is not a sealed canned product and should not be treated as shelf-stable.
- YieldThe peel of six large oranges comes to roughly a pound, so about a pound of sugar; expect a pint jar or rather more of finished conserve.
- Using itChop the drained strips into cake, pudding and mincemeat batters in place of commercial candied peel, which is usually far sweeter and blander. The leftover orange syrup is worth keeping for basting hams or sweetening drinks.
Candying citrus peel is one of the oldest sugar preservations in European cookery, predating the fruit's arrival as an everyday item; peel was too valuable to discard when whole oranges travelled north as a luxury. In American household books of the 1870s and 1880s, of which Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878) is a compendium of contributed receipts, conserves like this one sit in the economy tradition: the fruit had already been eaten or juiced, and the skin still held all the aromatic oil. The recipe's closing note — "for flavoring puddings, pies, etc." — places it as a pantry staple rather than a sweet, which is why no drying or sugar-rolling step is given. Home cooks who wanted candied peel as a confection would, it is often said, lift the strips out and roll them in granulated sugar; here they were meant to stay wet in their syrup until a cake needed them.