Pâte de Fruit: The Complete Guide
A pâte de fruit is a small cube of fruit that tastes more like the fruit than the fruit did. That is the whole trick and the reason the French have kept making them for seven centuries: cook a purée of apricots or blackcurrants or raspberries with sugar until most of the water is gone, set it with the fruit's own pectin, cut it into cubes and roll them in coarse sugar, and what remains is the fruit's flavor concentrated to the point of intensity, in a dense, yielding, slightly grainy jelly that dissolves slowly. A good one is a spoonful of jam that you can pick up. A bad one, and most of the world's "fruit jellies" are bad ones, is a gumdrop with fruit flavoring. This guide covers where they came from, how they are made, how to tell the two apart, the Provençal house, and the filled French bonbons that sit beside them.
The Auvergne and the harvest problem
Pâte de fruit is one of the oldest confections in France, and its origin is the same as jam's: a way to keep fruit through the winter before refrigeration. The tradition is strongest in the Auvergne, the mountainous center of France, where the town of Clermont-Ferrand has claimed the specialty since the Middle Ages and where records of fruit pastes sent as gifts to royalty go back to the fifteenth century. The cooks were, as usual, in the monasteries and the households of the nobility, and the fruits were what the region grew, apricot, quince, pear, plum, and the blackcurrants that would later make Burgundy's cassis. Quince paste, which sets on its own pectin without help, is the ancestor; the Spanish membrillo and Portuguese marmelada that our jam and marmalade guide describes are the same idea, and the word marmalade itself began as a quince paste.
The pectin science
A pâte de fruit sets because of pectin, the structural carbohydrate in fruit cell walls that, in the presence of enough sugar and enough acid, forms a gel as it cools. Some fruits have plenty, quince, apple, blackcurrant, citrus; others, strawberry, raspberry, apricot, have little, and a confectioner adds pectin, usually from apple or citrus peel, to make them set. The purée is cooked with sugar and glucose syrup to a high temperature, above about 105°C, so that the sugar concentration is high enough to gel and to preserve; a little acid, usually citric or tartaric, is added at the end to trigger the set. The mass is poured into a frame, left to firm overnight, cut into cubes with a guitar wire, and rolled in coarse sugar, which keeps the cubes from sticking and gives the crunch. It is the same chemistry as jam taken one step further, and the jam guide's rules about pectin and sugar apply.
Real pâte de fruit versus a fruit jelly
The difference is on the ingredient list and in the mouth. A real pâte de fruit lists fruit purée first, at half or more of the weight, then sugar, glucose and pectin, and nothing called "flavor." It is dense and slightly grainy, it tastes of the specific fruit, and it is opaque or faintly translucent with the color of the fruit rather than a dye. A commercial fruit jelly lists sugar and corn syrup first, gelatin or starch for the set, "natural flavors" and a color, and it is bouncy, clear and uniformly sweet. The real thing costs several times as much because the box is mostly fruit and the cooking reduces it by more than half; a kilo of apricots becomes a few hundred grams of pâte.
Francois Doucet, in Provence
The house is Francois Doucet, a family confectioner in Oraison, in the hills of Haute-Provence, in the fruit-growing country of the Durance valley where the apricots and the lavender grow. The company makes its pâtes de fruits from fruit purées, cooks them in copper, and cuts and sugars them by the old method; the assorted box runs through the classic flavors, apricot, raspberry, blackcurrant, pear, orange, strawberry, in cubes of a bite each. They are the French dinner-party sweet: a few on a plate with the coffee, per our dessert without baking, and the box that appears in French homes at Christmas and Easter. They are also, quietly, a cheese pairing, the apricot and pear cubes beside an aged sheep's cheese or a blue doing what membrillo does for Manchego.
The bonbon tin beside it
France's other great fruit sweet is the filled hard candy, the bonbon fourré: a shell of boiled sugar around a liquid or soft fruit center, made in the confectioneries of Normandy and the north. Barnier, a family house in Normandy founded in 1885, makes them, and the orchard flavors tin (shop the orchard flavors tin) is a mix of apple, pear, cherry, plum and the rest, each a glassy shell that shatters to a burst of fruit syrup. They belong to the same family of French sweets as the Flavigny pastilles in our producer guide, made by old houses, sold in a tin, meant for a pocket or a coat, and they are the candy French grandmothers keep in a dish by the door. A tin of Barnier and a box of Doucet is the French candy shelf in two objects.
How to serve and keep them
Pâtes de fruits are served as they are, at room temperature, on a small plate, never refrigerated, since cold dulls the fruit and humidity makes the sugar weep. They keep for months in their box in a cool dry cupboard; if the sugar coating begins to dissolve, the box has been somewhere damp, and the cubes are still good. Put out three or four per person after dinner with coffee, or a single cube on a saucer with an espresso, which is how a Provençal café does it. Slice a cube and put it on a cheese board beside the honey and the quince. Drop one into a glass of sparkling wine or sparkling tea and watch it fizz. Or eat them from the box in the car, which is what everyone actually does.
The Doucet box and the Barnier tin are in our candy collection at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, and ship nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com, beside the abbey pastilles and the Turin boxes that complete the old European candy shelf. Taste the apricot cube and then eat an apricot; the cube wins.
