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Fruit and Gelatine Candies: Green
Green Gage Paste 6 green gage plums 3/4 teaspoon gelatine 3/4 cup sugar 1 tablespoon cold water 3/4 cup syrup from canned green gage plums Put gelatine in cold water, and leave until it is needed. Drain syrup from canned green gage plums, and rub six plums through a sieve. Put syrup, fruit pulp, and sugar in saucepan, and boil, stirring gently to prevent burning, until mixture drops like thick jelly from the spoon, and holds its shape when tried on a cold saucer. Add soaked gelatine, and when dissolved, pour mixture into a buttered pan, in a layer one eighth of an inch thick. When stiff remove from pan, cut into fancy shapes with small tin cutters, and roll in coarse sugar, or crystallize. These may be dipped in melted chocolate or melted fondant if desired.
A fruit paste in the pâte de fruits family, thickened mostly by the plums' own pectin with a little gelatine for tenderness. Nearly everything depends on boiling the purée far enough before the gelatine goes in.
- The hinge: cook to the sheeting stage firstThe gelatine is a finisher, not the setting agent. Boil the plum pulp, syrup and sugar until the mixture drops like thick jelly from the spoon and holds its shape on a cold saucer, as the recipe directs. Stop short of that and no amount of gelatine will make a paste you can cut.
- Never boil the gelatineStir the softened gelatine in off the heat, or with the pan barely simmering. Prolonged boiling degrades it and you lose the slight chew it contributes.
- Green gagesReine Claude plums, small, round and greenish-gold when ripe. Canned green gages are scarce now; canned or jarred greengages from a European grocer work, or substitute another canned plum in light syrup and accept a different colour.
- Gelatine measureThree-quarters of a teaspoon of granulated gelatine is roughly a third of a modern 1/4-oz envelope. The small quantity is deliberate.
- SyrupThree-quarters of a cup of canning syrup already carries sugar, so the total sweetness is higher than the 3/4 cup of sugar suggests. If your plums are packed in heavy syrup, the paste will set faster and taste sweeter.
- The panAn eighth of an inch is thin, so use a pan wide enough to spread the whole batch that shallowly. Butter works, as the recipe says, but parchment or a lightly oiled silicone mat releases the sheet more reliably.
- Setting and cuttingGive it several hours at room temperature, uncovered, rather than chilling it; refrigeration draws moisture to the surface and makes the sugar coating weep. Cut with cutters dipped in hot water and wiped dry.
- "Crystallize"In this period that means dipping the finished pieces in a saturated sugar syrup and leaving them on a rack to grow a thin crust of sugar crystals. Rolling in coarse sanding sugar is the quicker route.
- Yield and keepingThe yield depends entirely on the size of your cutters. Store in a tin between layers of waxed paper; sugared pieces keep a week or two, chocolate-dipped ones rather less.
Fruit pastes of this kind descend from the medieval and early modern quiddany and marmalade traditions — fruit pulp boiled with sugar until stiff enough to slice, a preserve first and a confection second. The tell here is that the fruit is canned rather than fresh: the recipe is written for a cook working from the pantry shelf in any season, using the packing syrup as part of the sugar rather than throwing it away. Green gages themselves are an old European plum, generally traced to the Reine Claude of sixteenth-century France and said to have taken their English name from the Gage family, who grew them in Suffolk in the eighteenth century. They were prized for a honeyed flavour that survives cooking well, and they turn up often in preserves and confectionery.