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Crystallized Fruits: Drain
Drain pears, cover with cold syrup, and leave for twenty-four hours. Drain syrup from pears, add one cup sugar, bring to boiling point, cool, and pour over pears. Again let stand for twenty-four hours, drain syrup, add one cup sugar, bring to boiling point, and pour over the pears while hot. Again let stand for twenty-four hours, drain off syrup, and cook until it spins a long thread. Add pears, let them boil for one minute, and return both fruit and syrup to the crock for another twenty-four hours. Drain syrup, cook to 228 degree F., add pears, let them boil once, remove from syrup, let fruit dry, and it is ready for use.
This is the tail end of a multi-day candying process — the pears have already been blanched and given a first bath in light syrup elsewhere in the chapter, so start there rather than here. What follows is the slow ladder of sugar concentrations that draws water out of the fruit without collapsing it.
- Why the days matterEach rest lets the syrup and the fruit equalize. Rushing straight to a heavy syrup shrivels and toughens pears because the sugar pulls water out faster than it can move in. The five-day schedule is the whole technique; it is not padding.
- "Cold syrup"Presumably the light syrup from the earlier step, used cold rather than hot; the recipe is explicit that the first pouring is cold and only the later ones are hot.
- "Spins a long thread"The thread stage, roughly 230-234F on a candy thermometer — syrup drawn up between finger and spoon (dipped in cold water first) trails a thread rather than dropping in beads. The later instruction to cook to 228F is a slightly softer version of the same stage.
- Boil for one minute, and onceTake these literally. Extended boiling at thread stage turns the pears translucent and then mushy, and drives the syrup toward caramel.
- The crockA stoneware or glass vessel, not metal — days of hot acidic sugar syrup will pick up flavor from aluminum or bare cast iron. Any nonreactive bowl deep enough to keep the fruit submerged works. Weight the pears with a small plate if they float.
- Drying the fruitLift the pears onto a wire rack over a tray and leave them in a warm, dry, airy spot until the surface is tacky rather than wet — a day or two, or a few hours in an oven set to its lowest temperature with the door cracked. A humid kitchen is the usual reason candied fruit stays sticky.
- Sugar quantitiesThe two cups added along the way assume the original syrup from the earlier step, which the book does not restate here.
- Yield and keepingKeeping -- Stored in a tin or box between layers of waxed paper, in a cool dry place, it keeps for months; refrigeration makes it weep.
Candying by graduated syrups is one of the older sugar techniques in European confectionery, and appears in much this form in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English receipt books before it turns up in American candy manuals. In an age before reliable cold storage the point was preservation: sugar bound up enough of the fruit's water to discourage molds and yeasts. By the period of this book, home candying seems to have been as much a luxury as a necessity -- crystallized fruits were holiday gifts and dessert-table ornaments, echoing the French fruits confits sold by city confectioners. The exact thermometer reading of 228F sitting alongside the older finger-and-spoon test for the thread stage is a small snapshot of that transition.