Fruits Glacé
2 cups sugar Washed fruit 1 cup water Boil the sugar and water until the syrup becomes brittle when dropped in cold water. Dip the fruit in the syrup and set in a cool place.
A two-ingredient syrup dip that lives or dies on the sugar thermometer and the weather. The loose-leaf ingredient list has clearly lost a line — no sugar quantity survives — so treat the proportions as something you supply yourself.
- The missing sugarThe instructions call for boiling "the sugar and water" but only the cup of water is listed. Comparable glacé recipes tend to run somewhere in the region of two cups sugar to one cup water, though proportions vary; the original figure is simply not recoverable from this page.
- "Brittle when dropped in cold water"This is the hard-crack stage, 300-310F on a candy thermometer. A drop in cold water should form threads that snap rather than bend. Below that the coating stays tacky and weeps.
- The hinge: bone-dry fruit"Washed fruit" must be dried completely, inside and out, before dipping. Any surface water makes the syrup seize, spit and turn cloudy, and juice leaking from a broken skin will do the same. Grapes, cherries with stems, and orange segments with intact membrane work; cut fruit does not.
- Keep the syrup clearStir only until the sugar dissolves, then leave it alone and wash any crystals off the pan sides with a wet brush. One seed crystal turns the whole batch grainy and opaque. A tablespoon of corn syrup or a pinch of cream of tartar is cheap insurance.
- Weather mattersHard-crack sugar draws moisture from the air. On a humid day the shells go sticky within an hour whatever you do; pick a dry day and work quickly.
- Dipping and settingHold fruit on a fork or skewer, dip, let the excess drip, and set on an oiled marble slab or oiled parchment. "A cool place" means cool and dry — not the refrigerator, where condensation dissolves the glaze.
- Yield and keepingWith no sugar quantity surviving, no yield can be given. These are same-day sweets; they are at their best within a few hours and will soften by the next morning.
Fruits glacé belong to the confectioner's craft rather than the home kitchen. The French term simply means "iced" or "glazed" — a clear, glassy shell, distinct from the candied or crystallised fruit that is simmered in syrup over days. Glazed grapes, cherries and orange sections were common bonbon-dish and dessert-plate garnishes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The extreme brevity here is typical of candy sections in books of this kind: the author assumes the reader already knows the cold-water test for sugar stages, which was the common currency of household confectionery before thermometers were cheap.