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Crystallized Fruits: Sugar
Orange Sugar Cut sugar Oranges Rub the entire surface of blocks of sugar over the rind of oranges that have been washed and wiped dry. Crush the blocks of orange sugar with a rolling pin, and force through a coarse strainer.
Lemon Sugar Use lemons, and follow directions for making Orange Sugar. Marrons Glace 1 pound French chestnuts 1 teaspoon butter 1/3 cup lemon juice Cold water 2 cups sugar 2 cups water 1 teaspoon vanilla Cut a half-inch gash on flat side of chestnuts, and put in frying pan with butter. Shake over fire until butter is melted. Put in hot oven and let stand five minutes. Remove from oven, and with a small knife take off shells and skins. Cover chestnuts with cold water, add lemon juice, and soak overnight. Drain, cover with boiling water, simmer gently until tender, and drain. Put sugar and water in saucepan, stir until sugar is dissolved, boil five minutes, add vanilla and chestnuts, and keep hot without boiling for two hours. Drain syrup from nuts, boil until it spins a long thread, pour over the nuts, and leave over-night. Repeat. Again drain, add one teaspoon corn syrup, and boil to 238 degree F., or until syrup spins a thread. Add chestnuts, and allow syrup to boil up once over the nuts. Remove from fire, stir gently until syrup begins to grain, and remove chestnuts quickly to buttered tin. Serve in paper cases.
If any chestnuts should break in pieces, they may be used as centers for Chocolate Marrons.
Three related preparations: two flavored sugars made by abrasion, and a multi-day candied chestnut. The marrons are the real project — plan on four days and expect breakage.
- Cut sugar"Cut sugar" means loaf sugar cut into cubes — modern sugar cubes work identically. The hard block is what lets you scrape the colored oil-bearing layer of the peel without tearing into the bitter white pith.
- Rubbing the zestWork only until each face of the cube is stained orange, then turn it. Use unwaxed fruit if you can find it, and stop as soon as the surface of the peel looks scuffed rather than shredded.
- Storing the flavored sugarSieved orange or lemon sugar is damp with citrus oil and will cake. Spread it on a tray for an hour before jarring, and use it within a few weeks — the aroma fades fast.
- "Hot oven"For the five-minute chestnut roast, read it as somewhere around 400-450F. The point is only to make the shells and inner skins let go, not to cook the nuts.
- French chestnutsThese are marrons — the large, single-kernel cultivars sold in autumn, not the small multi-lobed nuts that split into segments when peeled. Buy heavy, glossy nuts with no rattle; a pound peels down to noticeably less. Vacuum-packed peeled chestnuts can be substituted, in which case skip the roasting and go straight to the lemon-water soak.
- The hinge: never let the syrup boil with the nuts in itApart from the final "boil up once," the syrup is either poured over the nuts or held hot without boiling. Chestnuts are starchy and fragile, and hard boiling breaks them up -- which is why the recipe offers the broken ones as chocolate marron centers. Keep the pan well below a simmer.
- Sugar stages"Spins a thread" is usually put somewhere between the low 220s and the mid-230s F; the final 238F falls within the soft-ball range. A thermometer is steadier than the thread test, and taking the syrup much higher risks a harder, cloudier coating.
- The graining stepStirring the finished syrup until it "begins to grain" deliberately starts crystallization, which is what gives glace marrons their thin frosted shell. Move fast once it clouds; thirty seconds of hesitation and the whole panful seizes around the nuts.
- Timing and yieldCount on four days: peel and soak overnight; next day simmer, make the syrup, and start the first overnight steeping; repeat the steeping; then the finish. A pound of unpeeled chestnuts should give somewhere around two dozen finished marrons, depending on size.
Rubbing a sugar loaf against citrus peel is a long-established way of capturing zest oil -- the sugar acts as both abrasive and carrier, and the resulting flavored sugar keeps better than grated rind. Marrons glaces belong to a different tradition: candied chestnuts are generally traced to the chestnut-growing regions of northern Italy and the Ardeche in southern France, where the fruit was a staple starch long before it was a luxury, and where commercial glaceing took hold in the nineteenth century. Their appearance in an American candy book of this period reflects how firmly French confectionery set the standard for what an ambitious home candy-maker aspired to; the closing note about salvaging broken nuts as chocolate centers is a confectioner's habit of thrift, and a quiet acknowledgment that some of them always break.