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Candied Oranges
Take seven good-sized oranges, peel carefully, divide into quarters and set aside. Boil together thre cupfuls of sugar and one of water to a syrup; add the juice of one lemon when sufficiently cooked; then take up each section of orange separately with a fine knitting needle and dip into the syrup; set aside on a large dish to cool and harden. Should the syrup get cold before all are done, it may be set over the fire again for a few moments.
A hard-crack sugar dip on fresh orange segments — quick to do, but the recipe leaves the two things that decide success unstated: how far to boil the syrup, and how dry the fruit must be.
- "Sufficiently cooked" means hard crackFor a coating that sets glassy rather than sticky, the syrup needs 300–310F on a candy thermometer. Below about 290F it stays tacky and weeps within the hour; past 320F it starts to colour and turn bitter.
- Dry the fruit or the coating will slide offPeel the oranges, strip every thread of pith, separate the segments and leave them on a rack or paper for an hour or two so the membrane surfaces are dry to the touch. Any free juice will make the hot syrup spit and will dissolve the shell from beneath.
- Why the lemon juice is thereThe acid inverts part of the sucrose and keeps the syrup from crystallising into a grainy mass. Add it near the end, as directed — early acid can invert too much sugar and leave the candy soft.
- "Quarters" means natural segments"Quarters" probably means natural segments -- the recipe later speaks of taking up "each section of orange separately", which suggests the individual sections rather than the fruit cut in four. Read that way, seven oranges gives roughly 60 to 80 pieces.
- The knitting needleA thin metal skewer or a bamboo satay stick does the same job. Dip, lift, let the excess run back into the pan for a second or two, then set the piece down on an oiled dish or a silicone mat rather than a bare plate, or it will glue itself down.
- Reheating the syrupIt can be brought back over low heat as the recipe says, but it will darken a little each time and any water that has boiled off must be judged by temperature, not by eye. Work in two smaller batches rather than reheating three or four times.
- Eat the same dayFresh fruit under a sugar shell draws moisture out overnight and the coating goes sticky and cloudy. These are made for the afternoon they are served — refrigeration makes it worse, not better.
Candying -- dipping or steeping fruit in boiled sugar -- is one of the oldest forms of confectionery in European cookery, and for a long period it was the work of the still-room rather than the kitchen, sugar being costly enough to count as a medicine and a luxury at once. Fresh oranges of this kind became far commoner in American households over the closing decades of the nineteenth century, as rail transport and the Florida and California groves expanded, where earlier they had been more of a seasonal treat. The technique is close to that of the French fruit déguisé, fresh segments given a thin glass coat of hard-crack sugar -- though this recipe, like many of its kind, still trusts the cook to judge the syrup by eye rather than by thermometer.