Home › Confections › Fruit Caramels
Fruit Caramels
Equal parts of nuts, raisins, dates and figs, put through the food chopper. Dust board with powdered sugar.
Roll out after kneading. Cut in squares.
— A Contributor
A no-cook confection of the church-supper sort: four ingredients, no thermometer, no candy stage. The whole thing turns on grinding the fruit fine enough that it binds itself.
- Not actually caramelsNothing here is cooked and no sugar is caramelized. 'Caramel' was often applied loosely to small squared sweets in community cookbooks of this kind, and what you get is closer to what we would call a fruit-and-nut bar.
- Equal parts by weightThe original does not say whether to measure by weight or volume, and the two give very different results with nuts against sticky dried fruit. Weight is the safer reading: 6 oz each of nuts, raisins, dates and figs makes a manageable batch.
- The food chopperA hand-cranked meat grinder with a coarse plate. A food processor does the same job, but pulse rather than run it — a continuous grind turns the fruit to paste and the nuts to butter, and the mixture will not hold a cut edge.
- Prep the fruit firstPit the dates and cut the hard stem knobs off the figs; dried fruit of this period was commonly sold whole and unpitted. Raisins were often sold with seeds as well, so check the package if you are using anything other than modern seedless.
- Kneading is what binds itThere is no syrup or egg white holding this together, only the fruit's own sugar and moisture worked out by hand. Knead on the sugared board until the mass is uniform and slightly tacky, three or four minutes. If it crumbles, a teaspoon of orange juice or a few extra dates will bring it together.
- Rolling and cuttingRoll to about half an inch. Dust the pin as well as the board with powdered sugar, and cut with a long knife wiped between strokes.
- Yield and keepingAbout 1½ lb of mixture; the number of squares depends on how thick you roll it. Layer them between waxed paper in a tin; they keep two or three weeks and firm up as they sit. Rolling each square in powdered sugar or fine coconut keeps them from sticking to each other.
Uncooked fruit-and-nut confections spread quickly through American community cookbooks in the first decades of the twentieth century, and the reason is sitting in the first line: the food chopper. Once a clamp-on hand grinder was standard kitchen equipment, dried fruit could be reduced to a workable paste in minutes, and a whole genre of candies appeared that needed no sugar boiling, no thermometer and no judgment about the hard-ball stage — a real advantage for a contributor cooking on an unreliable range. The Philathea books were compiled by women's Bible-class groups, whose fundraising sales and socials rewarded exactly this kind of sweet: cheap, made ahead, sliceable into uniform portions, and stable enough to sit on a table all afternoon.