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Candied Orange and Grape Fruit Peel
Cut orange or grape fruit peel into narrow strips, with the scissors. Cover with cold water, bring to boiling point, drain, and repeat four times. Measure the peel. For each cupful allow one-half cup each granulated sugar and Karo, Red Label. Add boiling water so the syrup will not quite cover the peel and simmer until translucent, from one to two hours. Drain and roll in granulated sugar and let dry over night.
A sound method that needs almost no adjustment beyond identifying one discontinued product. The blanching is the part people skip, and it is the part that decides whether the finished peel is candy or bitterness.
- Karo, Red LabelKaro was sold in colour-coded grades; Red Label was the darker, fuller-flavoured syrup and Blue Label the light one. Dark corn syrup is the closest current equivalent; light corn syrup works identically and gives a clearer, cleaner-tasting peel.
- Why the corn syrup is thereIt is not for sweetness but to keep the syrup from crystallising during a one- to two-hour simmer and to keep the finished strips pliable. Substituting all granulated sugar will usually give you grainy, hard peel.
- Five blanchings, and they matterRepeated blanching, and it matters -- cold water brought to a boil and drained, repeated four times; read strictly that gives five boilings in all, though the wording could be taken as four. Either way this is the hinge of the recipe: grapefruit pith is aggressively bitter and needs the repetition.
- Cutting the peelQuarter the fruit and peel it in wide sheets, then cut narrow strips with scissors as directed, before blanching. Leave the white pith attached; it holds the syrup and gives the peel its body.
- Judging translucencyThe peel is done when it looks glassy right through and the syrup has thickened to about the consistency of honey, around 225-230F if you want a number. Pull it before the syrup begins to colour, or the sugar will set hard on cooling.
- Draining and rollingLift the strips out with a fork, let the excess syrup run off for a minute or two, then toss in granulated sugar while still warm and tacky. Cold peel will not take a coating.
- Drying and storageSpread the strips on a rack, not on paper, so air reaches both sides; overnight is right in a dry kitchen, longer in humid weather. Once no longer sticky, keep in a tin with a little of the sugar for a month or more.
Candying citrus peel is thrift work that turned into confectionery: the peel is the part of an expensive imported fruit that would otherwise go to the pig bucket, and boiling it in sugar both preserved it and made it worth eating. The grapefruit here suggests the early twentieth century, when Florida groves had made the fruit a breakfast novelty in northern American cities rather than the curiosity it had been a generation earlier. The specified "Karo, Red Label" is the giveaway to this book's origins. Confectioners had long known that a glucose syrup prevents sugar from crystallising; these booklets were the means by which that professional knowledge reached domestic kitchens, along with a standing reminder of whose product to buy.