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Candied Lemon Orange Peel
To candy lemon or orange peel, remove the thin yellow rind from the fruit. Place it in strong salt and water for three days and soak it in clear cold water for twentyfour hours. Then put the peel into a stewpan with plenty of water and let it simmer until it is quite tender. Drain it, put into a bowl and cover with a thick syrup made of two pounds of sugar and a pint of water. Leave it for two hours. Then boil the peel in the syrup until it candies. Place it in a cool oven to dry, and as soon as it is entirely cold, store it in tins lined with parafine paper.
A five-day project, most of it waiting. The brining is what distinguishes this from modern candied peel, and it is worth understanding before you commit the fruit.
- The salt soak is optionalThe salt soak can be shortened -- Three days in strong brine followed by 24 hours in cold water was the older treatment, and it was generally understood to draw out bitterness. Modern citrus is milder, and two or three changes of boiling water (bring to a boil, drain, repeat) will remove much of the bitterness in well under an hour, though it is not strictly the same process.
- "Thin yellow rind" means zest onlyThe instruction is to pare off the coloured layer without the white pith beneath, which is where most of the bitterness sits. A vegetable peeler or a sharp paring knife gives thin strips, well under 1/8 inch.
- The syrupTwo pounds of sugar to a pint of water is roughly 4.5 cups sugar to 2 cups water — a heavy syrup, about 65 percent sugar by weight. Dissolve it fully over heat before pouring it over the drained peel.
- "Until it candies"The peel is done when the syrup has reduced to a thread and the strips look translucent and glassy, around 230–235F on a thermometer. Past that the sugar crystallises hard and the peel turns brittle rather than chewy.
- A cool ovenIn period usage this is the lowest working range of the oven, conventionally around 200-250F; with the door propped it serves to dry rather than bake. A wire rack at room temperature for 24 hours will also do.
- Parafine paperParaffin-coated paper, the period equivalent of waxed paper. Use waxed or parchment paper in an airtight tin; the peel keeps several months and will not stick if it is genuinely dry before storage.
- Simmer, do not boilDuring the tenderising stage the peel should barely move in the water. A hard boil breaks the strips apart before they have softened through.
Candied peel belongs to the older tradition of preserving by sugar. The long brine here suits an era when citrus arrived by rail or ship in variable condition, thick-rinded and often sharply bitter; salt was a common household means of drawing that bitterness out, used in a similar way on olives and on green walnuts. Candied peel was also a genuine economy, turning the discarded part of an expensive imported fruit into something that could be sliced into cakes and puddings months later, and the practice is generally traced back to medieval European confectionery, where preserved citron and orange peel were luxury goods traded out of the Mediterranean.