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Orange Caramels
Peel the oranges carefully, removing all the white part of the rind; separate them into sections without breaking the skin and lay them in confectioners' sugar for a short time. Make a syrup of loaf sugar and very little water, boil it till a very little of it tried in water is brittle, then dip the pieces of orange separately and quickly into it and lay them on a well-oiled tray to dry. They should be very carefully removed from the trays when dry, as the caramel is easily broken.
This is a hard-crack sugar dip on fresh fruit — closer to a candy-apple coating than to a chewy caramel. The whole thing turns on keeping water away from the sugar, both in the pan and on the fruit.
- The hinge: dry the segmentsJuice weeping from a nicked membrane will seize and cloud the syrup on contact. Peel and section so that no cell is broken; the recipe calls only for a short rest in the confectioners' sugar, the aim being a surface that is tacky rather than wet. Any segment that has leaked should be eaten, not dipped.
- "Brittle in water" is the hard-crack stageThat cold-water test corresponds to 300–310F on a candy thermometer. Below it the coating stays sticky and slumps; much above it the sugar begins to color and turns to caramel proper, which will taste burnt against citrus.
- Loaf sugarLoaf or cut-loaf sugar was refined cane sugar sold in a cone or block and broken up as needed. Ordinary granulated white sugar is the direct equivalent. "Very little water" means just enough to wet it — about 1/4 cup per cup of sugar.
- Guard against grainingA spoonful of corn syrup, or a few drops of lemon juice, per cup of sugar is the modern insurance against the syrup crystallizing in the pan. Wash sugar crystals down from the sides with a wet brush and do not stir once it boils.
- Dipping and the trayUse a fork or dipping loop, in and out in a second or two, and keep the pan over the lowest possible heat so the syrup stays fluid without climbing past 310F. Oil the tray lightly, or use a silicone mat, which releases better than the oiled tray the recipe calls for.
- HumidityHard-crack sugar on wet fruit is a same-day sweet. In a damp kitchen the shells go sticky within a couple of hours; do not refrigerate them and do not stack them.
- YieldFour large navel oranges give roughly 40 segments and need about 2 cups of sugar for the syrup, with enough left in the pan to dip comfortably.
Dipped fruit of this kind belonged to the dessert service rather than the candy counter — part of the tray of petits fours, glacé fruits and bonbons that closed a long hotel dinner around 1900. The name is loose by later usage: "caramel" here means the clear boiled-sugar coating rather than the milk-and-butter chew the word came to signify in America, and confectioners of the period also called the result an orange glacé. Whole segments in a brittle shell could not be made far in advance or shipped. Oscar Tschirky, who was maître d'hôtel rather than chef, compiled the 1896 Cook Book from the house's working repertoire, and short entries like this one read as reminders for someone who already knew the technique.