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Candied Nectarines
Cut the nectarines to extract the stones, put the fruit in a pan with half their weight of crushed loaf sugar and one gill of water to each pound of sugar; boil over a good fire until the syrup is clear, carefully removing the scum as it rises. Skim out the nectarines, put them on flat dishes, cover, and let them remain for a day. Put the pan with the sugar over the fire and boil until it is thick, then add the fruit and boil slowly until quite hot. Take them out again, put them on a dish and let them remain for one day longer. Boil the syrup again, add the fruit, and let it remain for a short time. Place them on a sieve to dry, sprinkle them over with powdered sugar turning frequently until dry and candied when they will be fit for use. Candied nectarines will keep for some time.
Candied or Crystallized Nuts Put one breakfast cupful of sugar and same of water into a sugar boiler, and boil to the crack degree. Put the boiler into a saucepan of boiling water to keep the syrup hot, and dip in the required quantity of blanched nuts, sticking them on the point of a needle, or thin skewer to do so; then put them on a slightly buttered dish and let them cool. If not sufficiently coated with the syrup, dip them again. When dry they are ready to serve.
Two confections run together in one entry: a multi-day candied fruit and a quick hard-crack nut. Both are sugar work, and both depend on reading the syrup rather than the clock.
- The gillOne gill is half a cup, 4 fl oz. So the syrup starts at half a cup of water per pound of sugar, with sugar at half the weight of the fruit — 2 lb nectarines takes 1 lb sugar and 1/2 cup water.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a hard cone and broken up for use; crushed loaf sugar is simply granulated white sugar. Powdered sugar for the final dusting meant finely ground sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar of today, though the modern kind works and resists clumping better.
- The hinge: rising sugar concentrationThe point of the repeated boil-and-rest is osmotic. Each cycle concentrates the syrup and gives the fruit a day to equilibrate, so sugar replaces water in the flesh without collapsing it. Rushing it to one long boil gives shrivelled, leathery fruit swimming in syrup.
- SkimmingThe scum is froth, fruit debris and impurities carried in with the sugar. Take it off while the syrup is still thin; once the sugar concentrates, anything left behind clouds the finish and encourages crystallisation.
- "Boil until it is thick"The recipe gives no stage or temperature; in practice the second and third passes want a syrup boiled a little past the thin stage, around 220-230F, thick enough to coat but not so concentrated that it sets firm as it cools.
- Crack degree, for the nutsThe crack is 290-310F on a thermometer, the temperature at which a drizzle of syrup dropped in cold water shatters instead of bending. Below that the coating stays tacky and will weep.
- Sugar boiler and needleA sugar boiler is an unlined copper or heavy-bottomed pan; any thick-based saucepan does. Holding the pan in simmering water keeps the syrup fluid enough to dip, but the syrup will thicken as it sits, so work quickly.
- Drying and keepingAllow three days or so for the nectarines, plus a day or more on the sieve. Dried properly they keep well in a tin between layers of parchment, which is presumably what the recipe means by "will keep for some time"; in humid weather they go sticky.
Candying by successive boilings is one of the oldest forms of preservation in European cookery, older than canning and older than reliable refrigeration, and it survived into the twentieth century as a luxury rather than a necessity. Candied fruits and crystallised nuts belonged to the petits fours and dessert service — the small sweet things set out at the end of a long menu, alongside bonbons and glacé chestnuts. The nectarine itself is a smooth-skinned peach, a genetic variant rather than a hybrid. The instruction to work with a needle and a slightly buttered dish is straight out of the professional confectioner's repertoire.