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Candied Lemon and Orange Peel
Lemon and orange peel if saved can be put to excellent use. Take out the greater portion of the white inside; throw the rinds into boiling water and simmer gently for twenty minutes. Drain, weigh and take a pound of sugar to every pound of peel. Put a layer of sugar and a layer of fruit into the preserving kettle; stand it over a slow fire until the sugar melts. When melted, cook slowly until the rinas are transparent. Lift them out; drain them and when nearly dry roll in granulated sugar.
A straightforward candy that works exactly as written; the only real variables are how much pith you remove and how patiently you cook the syrup.
- The hinge: cook to transparency, not to a clockThe peel is done when it turns translucent right through and the syrup has thickened to a heavy, slow-bubbling state. The recipe deliberately gives no time here; it will depend on how thick the peel is. Pulling it early leaves a wet, cloudy strip that will not dry; pushing past it caramelises the sugar and toughens the peel.
- "A slow fire"Low heat on the smallest burner. Sugar and peel with no added water will scorch quickly, so let the sugar melt gently and stir only enough to keep the layers moving.
- White pithScrape off most of it with a spoon, but leave a thin layer — it holds the syrup and gives the finished peel its body. Stripping it to the bare zest yields something closer to a brittle shred.
- BitternessTwenty minutes' simmer suits thin-skinned lemons. Modern thick-skinned navel oranges and grapefruit are more bitter; two or three changes of boiling water, five to ten minutes each, before the long simmer gives a milder result.
- Preserving kettleAny wide, heavy-bottomed non-reactive pan. A wide base matters more than depth, since the peel should sit in a shallow layer rather than pile up.
- Unwaxed fruitSupermarket citrus is usually waxed and often treated with a fungicide on the skin. Scrub in warm water, or buy unwaxed fruit, since the peel is the whole dish here.
- Drying and rollingDrain on a rack over a tray for several hours until tacky but not sticky, then toss in granulated sugar. Rolling while still wet dissolves the coating into a syrupy mess.
- Yield and keepingStored airtight in a cool place the finished peel keeps for a month or more; save the leftover syrup for sweetening drinks.
Candying citrus peel is one of the oldest uses of sugar in European cookery, associated with the medieval and Renaissance apothecary's trade in "succade" — fruit preserved in syrup and sold as much for medicine as for pleasure. By the time this recipe was written the technique had come down to plain household thrift: oranges and lemons were an expensive import, and the rind was the part most easily wasted. Note the opening words — "if saved" — which place the recipe in the no-waste tradition of household cookery writing. The equal-weight rule of sugar to peel is close to the ratio used for marmalade and other preserves, and equal weights are still common in candied peel recipes.