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Dried Fruits (To cook dried fruits)
To cook dried fruits thoroughly they should after careful washing be soaked over night. Next morning put them over the fire in the water in which they have been soaked; bring to a boil; then simmer slowly until the fruit is thoroughly cooked but not broken. Sweeten to taste. Very much less sugar will be needed than for fresh fruit.
If desired cook a little stick cinnamon or other spice with the fruit. Pears, which are apt to be insipid, are especially improved by this addition.
LEMON BUTTER No. 1 1/2 cup sugar 1 ounce butter 1 lemon 1 egg Beat the butter and sugar to a cream and add the beaten egg; then add the lemon, juice and rind, and stir over hot water until the mixture thickens. Remove from fire and stir until cool. LEMON BUTTER No. 2 1/2 cup sugar 1/2 tablespoon cornstarch 1 lemon 1 teaspoon butter 1/2 cup water 1 egg Mix the sugar and cornstarch; add the juice and rind of the lemon and the butter; then add the water and cook over hot water until the cornstarch clarifies. Pour the mixture on the beaten egg; return to the fire and stir until it thickens.
Two separate items share this page: a general method for stewing dried fruit, and two versions of what we would now call lemon curd. Both are sound, but modern dried fruit and modern egg handling change the details.
- Today's dried fruit needs less soakingToday's dried fruit often needs less soaking -- Early-20th-century dried apples, pears and peaches were dried hard and often stored for months. Much supermarket dried fruit is partly moist and may be sulphured; two to four hours of soaking is usually enough, and prunes or apricots may need none. Keep the soaking water, as the recipe says, since sugar and flavour leach into it.
- Simmer, and watch for the breakThe hinge here is "thoroughly cooked but not broken." Once the water is boiling, drop it to a bare simmer with almost no movement on the surface; 20 to 40 minutes depending on the fruit. Apple and pear slices collapse quickly, prunes take longer.
- Sweeten at the end, not the startSugar added early firms the skins and slows softening. The note about needing much less sugar is accurate: drying concentrates the fruit's own sugars several times over, so start with a tablespoon or two per pound and taste.
- Spice quantitiesA single 2-inch stick of cinnamon, or two cloves and a strip of lemon peel, is enough for a pound of fruit. Remove whole spices before serving. A pound of dried fruit swells to serve four to six.
- 1 ounce butterTwo tablespoons. The 1 teaspoon in No. 2 is genuinely that small; the cornstarch is doing the thickening there.
- "Over hot water" means a double boilerBoth lemon butters are egg-thickened and will scramble over direct heat. Use a bowl over barely simmering water, stir constantly, and pull it off when it coats the back of a spoon; that is around 170F, which is also hot enough to make the egg safe. Do not let it boil.
- "Until the cornstarch clarifies"The starch mixture turns from milky and opaque to glossy and translucent, which signals the starch has fully gelatinised and lost its raw taste. In No. 2 the hot mixture is then poured onto the beaten egg to temper it before returning to the heat.
- Rind and yieldGrate the zest finely and avoid the white pith, or strain the finished curd. No. 1 makes something under a cup; No. 2, with its added half-cup of water, makes noticeably more. Keep it refrigerated and use within a week.
Stewed dried fruit was a winter staple in any household without reliable access to fresh produce. Sulphured commercial dried fruit and cold storage were both spreading in the early 1900s, which is why the book can assume the reader has dried pears at all. The two lemon butters are the same thing English cooks called lemon cheese or lemon curd, a name often said to come from the way the mixture sets thick like a soft cheese; the second version, thickened with cornstarch and using a fraction of the butter, is a frugal variant of a kind found in American books.