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Stewed Dried Fruit
All kinds of dried fruit should be carefully looked over, washed and drained in a colander. It should then be soaked an hour or more before boiling; put it in a porcelain-lined kettle and boil until nearly done, then add the sugar and cook until soft. Many kinds of dried fruit such as apricots, peaches, etc., can be soaked and then cooked in a syrup, the same as fresh fruits, making a nice preserve.
A method rather than a formula: the book assumes you know how much fruit you have and how sweet you like it. Two details in it still matter — sugar goes in late, and the pot must not react with the fruit acid.
- Add the sugar lateThis is the hinge. Sugar in the water from the start draws moisture out of the fruit and sets the skins, so the pieces stay leathery no matter how long they cook. Simmer in plain water until the fruit is nearly tender, then sweeten and finish.
- Porcelain-lined kettleAn enamelled cast-iron or heavy enamelled steel pot. The point is a non-reactive surface: bare iron, aluminium or unlined copper will pick up a metallic taste and dull the colour of acidic fruit. Stainless steel is fine.
- Quantities, since none are givenA workable ratio is 1 lb dried fruit to about 3 cups water, with 1/4 to 1/2 cup sugar stirred in at the end. Prunes and figs need less sugar than sour apples or tart apricots.
- Modern dried fruit soaks fasterCommercial dried fruit today is often only partially dried, and some is treated to stay moist, so it can be considerably softer than fully dried fruit. Thirty minutes of soaking is often enough; very hard fruit or homemade dried fruit still wants the full hour or overnight.
- Cooking timesOnce soaked, apricots and peaches take roughly 15–20 minutes at a bare simmer, prunes 20–25, apple rings 10–15. Keep it below a rolling boil or the fruit collapses into a purée.
- Save the soaking waterCook the fruit in the liquid it soaked in. It carries sugar and flavour, and discarding it in favour of fresh water gives a thinner, blander syrup.
- Sulphured or notBright orange dried apricots are sulphur-treated; the brown ones are not. Unsulphured fruit gives a darker, more caramelised stew and can take a strip of lemon peel to lift it.
- The "nice preserve" is not canningFruit cooked in syrup this way keeps a week or two covered in the refrigerator. It is not a shelf-stable preserve — the recipe gives no sugar concentration, no jar processing and no times, so treat the result as a fresh compote.
- Yield and servingA pound of dried fruit makes roughly 3 to 4 cups stewed. It was commonly eaten warm at breakfast, often with cream; it also sits well beside roast pork or on porridge.
Stewed dried fruit was a common winter fruit course in American households before reliable cold storage and cheap canned goods, and its appearance in a 1911 Butterick volume — a book issued by a pattern company as part of a broad household library — reflects how routine it was. Drying was among the oldest and cheapest forms of fruit preservation, done on trays in the sun or in the warm space above a stove, and the resulting apple rings, prunes, peaches and apricots were sold loose from barrels. The instruction to look the fruit over carefully is not decorative; barrel fruit arrived with stems and grit. The closing note about syrup-cooked apricots "making a nice preserve" shows how thin the line was between a stewed dessert and a jar for the pantry shelf.