Candied or glacé fruit has been around since the 14th  century. To make glacé fruits take a whole fruit, small pieces of fruit, or even pieces of peel, and drop them into heated sugar syrup. The sugar actually absorbs the moisture from the fruit, which acts as a preservative while creating a sweet, glistening result.

Today, glacé fruits are enjoyed in many wonderful iterations. They are dipped in chocolate or strewn atop cakes for decorative purposes while still maintaining their identity as candy. They also appear in cocktails, although may be confused with a similar cherry, the Maraschino Cherries, which is cured in syrup, rather than cooked.

Above all, glacé fruits are a formidable presence in such foods as fruit cake. Their presence gives us insight into the genesis of today’s glacé . The cake’s primary attribute was its durability. The oldest fruitcake on record, roughly 4,176 years ago. Fruit cakes made of pomegranate seeds, pine nuts, raisins, barley

mash, honeyed wine, amongst others were used in burials as sustenance for the dead and by Roman soldiers who carried them, unscathed, into battle. During the Crusades, knights used fruitcakes made of stale bread, honey, spices, dried fruit, and mead to get through the month’s-long trek to the Holy Land. Today’s glistening fruit began around the 14th century with glacé - fruits heated in sugar syrup, which doubled as a preservative and tasty treat.

By the 1800s, a typical fruit cake was chockfull of citrus peel, pineapples, plums, dates, pears, and cherries, all drenched in sugar, sugar, sugar. Fruit cake seeped into the Victorian Christmas rituals, as well, which became the seeds of today’s American Christmas events.