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Citron Diamonds
(Another Turkish confection.) Pare and chop 1 large fresh citron. Cover it with water and boil until tender. Drain it, add enough lemon juice or lime juice to cover. Renew, by straining this juice, for 3 days. Drain it finally, put into enough boiling syrup of sugar and water, and stir until a thick, green paste. Add 1/4 cup of rosewater, and boil until it hardens when dropped into ice water. Pour into oiled pans, 1/2 inch deep; when cold, cut into diamonds, dip in sugar, and put away in boxes.
ALMOND NOUGAT. (Montelimert, France.) Boil 4 ounces gum arabic and 8 ounces of cold water until clear; strain, add 1 pound of pulverized sugar, and stir on the fire until thick. Beat it with an egg-beater, add then the stiffly beaten white of 1 egg, a tablespoonful of vanilla, and a pound of blanched and chopped almonds. Pour into an oiled mould, after stirring well; set in a dry place to cool, cut into squares, and wrap each in oiled paper.
Two confections run together on one page: a Turkish-style candied citron paste and a gum-arabic nougat. Both are sugar work, and both depend on stages the original describes only by eye.
- Citron means the fruitThis is Citrus medica — a knobbly lemon relative that is almost all thick white pith and very little juice. It is not the candied green and red "citron" sold for fruitcake, and not the citron melon. Look for it in Middle Eastern, Italian or Jewish groceries, especially around Sukkot.
- The three-day juice soak"Renew, by straining this juice, for 3 days" means changing the lemon or lime juice daily over three days, straining it each time; the wording does not make clear whether the same juice is returned or fresh juice added. It is a maceration to firm the pith and draw out bitterness. Keep it refrigerated for those three days; the original assumed a cold larder.
- Boiling syrup, unspecifiedNo quantities are given for the syrup. A working ratio is two parts sugar to one part water by weight, enough to cover the fruit, cooked down with the citron until the mass thickens.
- "Hardens when dropped into ice water"The book's only guide is its own test: a dropped bead that sets firm rather than staying pliable. That puts it somewhere at the upper end of the sugar scale, between hard ball and hard crack, but no temperature is given. If the drop stays soft or bends, it is not there yet, and the diamonds will weep in the box.
- The green pasteFresh citron pith cooks to a pale translucent ivory, not green. The colour named here would have to come from tinting; the recipe says nothing about how.
- Gum arabic for the nougatFour ounces of gum arabic to eight ounces of water gives a very stiff mucilage — dissolve it slowly, it takes time, then strain out the bark and grit. Food-grade acacia gum, sold as powder, is the same material and dissolves faster than the old lumps.
- Pulverized sugarIn 1900 this meant granulated sugar ground fine, with no cornstarch in it. Modern confectioners' sugar carries 3 percent starch; caster or superfine sugar is the closer match here.
- Oiled pans and mouldsUse a neutral oil, and line with parchment as well — both mixtures set hard and will fight a bare pan. Cut the citron while it is warm enough to yield but cool enough to hold an edge.
- YieldThe nougat, at a pound of sugar and a pound of almonds, fills a standard 8-inch square pan about an inch deep and gives roughly 40 pieces. The citron depends entirely on the size of the fruit.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea belongs to a genre that flourished around 1900: the cookbook as travel souvenir, its recipes collected abroad and labelled by place rather than by kitchen. Hence the parenthetical geography here — a Turkish confection set beside one credited to Montélimar, the town in the Drôme whose almond-and-honey nougat has been its defining product since at least the eighteenth century, and which is generally traced to the arrival of almond cultivation in the region. The citron sweetmeat sits in the older Levantine tradition that also produced lokum: fruit or paste set firm, cut into lozenges, dusted with sugar and stored in boxes. Gum arabic, the setting agent in the nougat, was a staple of the confectioner's cupboard long before gelatine was cheap — sap tapped from acacia trees and shipped through Egyptian and Sudanese ports, which is how a French candy came to depend on an African import.</p>