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Fruit and Gelatine Candies: Apple
Apple Paste Candy 5 apples 2 cups water 1 1/2 cups sugar Flavor Wipe apples, and cut in pieces, put in sauce-pan, add water, and cook until apples are soft.
Drain the liquid, of which there should be three fourths cup, into a clean saucepan, add sugar, and boil to 238 degree F., or until it will form a soft ball when tried in cold water. Rub apple pulp through sieve, add to syrup, and boil, stirring constantly to prevent burning, until mixture is so thick that it leaves the pan, and follows the spoon during the stirring. Add flavor as desired. Orange, raspberry, or lemon extract, one tablespoon lime juice, or a few drops of oil of peppermint are good. Paste may be colored delicately to correspond with flavor used. Drop paste from tip of spoon in rounds on wax paper, or spread in a buttered pan, let it dry, and cut in fancy shapes. Roll in coarse sugar or crystallize.
This paste may be used as filling for dates, or as a center for chocolates, or for coating pieces of marshmallow paste.
This is a fruit paste in the tradition of quince or apple cheese — cooked pulp reduced with sugar until it holds a shape. The whole recipe turns on how far you take that reduction.
- The hinge: cook it far enough"Leaves the pan and follows the spoon" means the paste pulls away from the sides in a mass and holds a furrow for a second when you drag the spoon through. Stop short of that and it will never dry firm enough to cut; expect 20 to 40 minutes of near-constant stirring over low to medium heat.
- Apples matter more than the recipe admitsUse tart, high-pectin fruit with the skins and cores left in during the first cooking — that is where the pectin and much of the flavor sit, and the sieve removes them afterward. Bramley, Granny Smith or windfall cooking apples give a paste that sets; soft sweet eating apples often will not.
- Five apples, three-quarters cup liquid"Five apples" is roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb. If your drained liquid comes out well over three-quarters of a cup, boil it down to that before adding sugar; if under, top up with water.
- 238°FSoft-ball stage. A digital or candy thermometer is more reliable than the cold-water test, but check calibration in boiling water first — at altitude, subtract about 1°F per 500 feet above sea level.
- Flavoring quantitiesA tablespoon of extract is a great deal by current standards. Add half, taste, and go on from there. Oil of peppermint is potent — a few drops is literal.
- ColoringThe recipe does not say what kind of coloring to use. Gel colors are more concentrated and add less moisture to a paste you have just spent half an hour drying out; use a toothpick's worth.
- Drying and cuttingSpread about 1/2 inch deep in a buttered or parchment-lined pan and leave uncovered at room temperature 24 to 48 hours until the surface is dry to the touch. Coarse or granulated sugar goes on after drying, not before, or it dissolves into syrup.
- Yield and keepingRoughly 3/4 to 1 lb of paste, or 40 to 50 small squares. Layer between wax paper in a tin; in a sealed airtight container it can sweat and go sticky.
Fruit pastes of this kind belong to a tradition at least as old as the sugar-boiling candy work that surrounds them in books like this one. Cooked, sweetened, dried fruit pulp was a standard way of carrying fruit through winter long before canning existed: marmelada and Spanish membrillo made from quince, French pâte de fruits, and the English "apple cheese" and the "quiddany" of seventeenth-century receipt books all work on the same principle. Apples earn their place here because they are cheap, abundant in autumn, and unusually high in pectin, which does the setting work that gelatine does elsewhere in this chapter. The closing lines suggest a confectioner's book rather than a preserving manual: the paste is treated as a component, a stuffing for dates, a center to be enrobed in chocolate, a coating for marshmallow — the vocabulary of a period when home candy-making was being taught as a small domestic craft with professional ambitions.