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Dried Grape Fruit
Cut the fruit into seven or eight pieces lengthwise, pick out the pips, place the fruit in a saucepan with plenty of water and boil until it becomes soft. Put the pieces on a sieve and drain them well; then put them into a pan with some syrup at twenty-eight degrees and let them simmer for ten minutes. Turn the fruit with the syrup into a basin and leave them. On the following day strain the syrup off the fruit, boil it up again and pour it over the fruit. Repeat the same operation on the three following days. On the fourth day arrange the pieces of fruit on a wire tray and place them in the screen to dry. Dip the pieces of fruit into grained sugar, arrange them a short distance from each other on the tray, and put them again in the screen. When thoroughly dry lift the fruit from the screen by pushing the fingers through underneath, for by doing it in this way it is not so likely to break the sugar. Pack the fruit for preserving between layers of cardboard in paper boxes.
This is candied grapefruit peel and flesh in the French confectioner's manner, spread over five or six days. Nothing here is difficult, but two terms — syrup "at twenty-eight degrees" and "the screen" — need translating before you start.
- Syrup at twenty-eight degreesThis is the Baumé scale read with a saccharometer, not an oven or thermometer reading. Twenty-eight degrees Baumé is roughly 52 percent sugar by weight, which you get close to with about equal weights of sugar and water, boiled to dissolve. If you have a refractometer, aim for around 52 Brix at the start; the strength rises each day as the syrup is reboiled, which is the whole point of the process.
- The screenA drying screen or cupboard — a warm, ventilated box near the range. No temperature is recorded anywhere in the recipe; the aim is a gentle warmth well below baking heat. A dehydrator on its lowest setting does the same work, as will an oven at its lowest mark with the door propped open. The fruit should dry, not bake.
- PipsSeeds. Grapefruit of the 1890s were seedy in a way modern Ruby Reds and Marsh Whites are not, so the picking-out may take you no time at all.
- The first boiling is the hingeThe fruit is candied with its peel on, and that peel carries the bitterness. Boiling in "plenty of water" until soft is what leaches it; if you rush this stage the finished sweet is harsh. Changing the water two or three times is a common modern remedy, though this recipe calls for a single boiling. The fruit should be genuinely tender — a skewer through the white pith with no resistance — before it goes near syrup.
- Why five daysSugar is driven into the fruit gradually. Dropping soft fruit straight into heavy syrup shrivels and toughens it; reboiling and repouring each day raises the concentration in steps the flesh can follow. The schedule is not padding and cannot be shortened much.
- Grained sugarOrdinary granulated. Caster or superfine gives a finer coat but a less traditional glitter.
- PackingThe layers of cardboard separate the pieces and protect the fragile sugar coat; whether they also served as a moisture buffer is a guess. Parchment or waxed paper in a tin does the job now. Kept dry, candied peel holds for months; in humid air the sugar coat weeps.
- YieldThe original gives none. The recipe cuts each fruit into seven or eight pieces, so scale by the number of fruit. No syrup quantity is stated, so batch size is left to the cook.
Oscar Tschirky's book appeared in 1896, when grapefruit was still something of a novelty on American tables — grown commercially in Florida only since the 1880s and often sold under its older name, pomelo. It arrived at hotel breakfasts as a fashionable bitter first course, and the Waldorf, which did a great deal to establish what a fashionable New York breakfast looked like, would have had a steady supply of halves and, inevitably, of trimmings. Candying was the classic confectioner's answer: the technique here, with its Baumé-scale syrup and its daily reboiling, is straight out of the French pastry kitchen, applied to a fruit that was still obscure in Europe at the time. The result belongs with the petits fours and after-dinner sweets rather than the breakfast table.