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Candied Angelica
(France.) Cut the stalks, free from roots and leaves, in April. Cut into inch-pieces, cover with sugar syrup, and cook until tender. Drain them, dust with powdered sugar, dry in the oven, and put away tightly for decorating puddings or ices or flavoring desserts.
A four-line sketch of a process that traditionally took several days. The gaps are worth filling before you start.
- Identify the plant with certaintyThe candied stalk is Angelica archangelica (or the related A. atropurpurea). Several deadly umbellifers, notably water hemlock and poison hemlock, grow in the same damp ground and look similar to an untrained eye. Buy plants from a nursery or use stalks from your own garden rather than foraging on a guess.
- What "sugar syrup" means hereStart with a light syrup, roughly equal weights of sugar and water, and expect to strengthen it. Confectioners' practice is to drain the stalks each day, add more sugar to the syrup, reheat, and pour it back over — repeating for four or five days until the pieces are translucent and saturated. A single boil in light syrup leaves the pith watery and the candy will mould in storage.
- Blanch firstThe recipe omits the step that keeps the colour. Simmer the cut stalks in plain water for a few minutes until they yield to a fingernail, then peel off the stringy outer skin before they go into syrup. Old kitchen manuals often added a pinch of soda to the blanching water to fix the green; it also softens the stalk fast, so watch it.
- Oven drying temperature"Dry in the oven" here means a very slow oven: residual heat from a cooling oven or a warming shelf rather than baking heat. Use the lowest setting your oven offers, with the door propped, for several hours until the surface is dry and no longer tacky. Too much heat and the pieces will scorch at the edges and go brittle.
- April, and whyThe instruction to cut in April is about texture, not tradition. Young stalks before the plant bolts are hollow, tender and thin-skinned; once it throws up a flower head the stems go woody and fibrous and no amount of syrup will fix them.
- Storage"Put away tightly" means airtight, in a cool dry place, with the pieces layered in caster sugar so they do not weld together. Properly saturated angelica keeps a year and more; anything still soft or weeping syrup will ferment.
- Yield and useFinished weight comes out broadly in the region of the trimmed weight you started with, but it varies a good deal with how heavily the pieces are saturated. Cut into thin strips or lozenges for the tops of trifles and ice creams, or chop it fine into cake batter, where it behaves like candied peel with a musky, juniper-and-celery note.
Angelica was grown across northern Europe as much for medicine as for the table — the name is traditionally explained by the story, repeated in early herbals, that the plant was revealed by an angel as a protection against plague, and the root appears in old pharmacopoeias as a stimulant and digestive. The candied stalk became a French speciality, associated above all with Niort in Poitou, where local nuns and later commercial confectioners built a trade in it that survives; the attribution "(France.)" in this collection may well point to that reputation. Candied angelica earned its place among preserves and confections as a stable green garnish for the nineteenth-century pastry cook — green angelica, red cherry and white almond made a conventional palette for decorating a trifle or a moulded ice.