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Crystallized Fruits
Make a syrup of a pound of sugar and one-half cup of water. Boil, without stirring, until a drop put into iced water becomes immediately brittle. Remove the saucepan from the fire and set it in an outer pan of boiling water. Add to the syrup the juice of a quarter of a lemon. Run the prongs of a sharp pickle fork through each piece of fruit to be candied, and dip it in the hot syrup. Lay on buttered paper to dry.
This is a glacé fruit — fruit sealed in a shell of hard sugar — rather than the slow syrup-candying that the word "crystallized" also covers. Everything depends on getting the syrup to the hard-crack stage and keeping the fruit dry.
- The temperature to aim for"A drop put into iced water becomes immediately brittle" is hard crack, 300-310F on a candy thermometer. Below that the coating stays tacky and will weep within the hour.
- Quantities in modern termsA pound of granulated sugar is about 2 1/4 cups; half a cup of water is enough to dissolve it. The juice of a quarter lemon is a teaspoon or two.
- Why the lemon juiceThe acid inverts a little of the sucrose, which discourages the syrup from setting up grainy in the pan. Add it off the heat, as the book says, not at the start of the boil.
- Do not stir, and wash the sidesStirring a boiling sugar syrup seeds crystals. Brush the inside of the pan down with a wet pastry brush during the first few minutes, then leave it alone.
- The hot-water bathThe outer pan of boiling water holds the syrup fluid enough to dip in without cooling and thickening. Keep it at a bare simmer and keep the lid off the syrup pan so condensation does not drip in -- stray drops of water can cloud or granulate the batch.
- The fruit must be bone dryThis is the hinge. Any surface moisture turns the shell sticky and cloudy. Grapes, cherries with stems, orange segments and Cape gooseberries all work, but they must be washed well ahead and dried thoroughly; segmented citrus should be left to air-dry on a rack for an hour.
- Buttered paperParchment or a silicone mat needs no butter and releases more cleanly than the greased paper of 1911.
- Eat the same dayFresh fruit under a sugar shell keeps only a few hours before juice migrates through and dissolves the coating. Dried or already-candied fruit dipped this way will hold for a day or two in a dry room.
Sugar-glazed fruit belongs to the older tradition of the confectioner's dessert course, where the last thing on the table was a dish of small bright sweets rather than a plated pudding. The slow method -- steeping fruit in syrups of rising density over days or weeks -- is generally traced to Provence, and Apt still markets itself on candied fruit; what the Butterick book gives instead is the quick domestic shortcut, a dip in hard-crack syrup that produces a glassy shell in seconds. Its presence in a 1911 American household manual reflects how much cheaper refined sugar had become: a pound of it used purely for decoration would have been a greater extravagance a century earlier. The "sharp pickle fork" is a period detail worth noting, an example of the specialized table implements sold in this era.