Display at Richaud, Confiseur

“Welcome to Apt, the capital of confited fruit,” says a sign at the center of town in Apt, Provence. I stopped there on my way home from India, meeting up with Wes, because my parents were spending the month there. It was the week before Easter, and all the confiseries’ windows were filled with Easter baskets and pyramids of meticulously prettified candies like pointed ovals of pastel-glazed nougat.

As for confited fruit, there are three or four shops selling elaborate assemblages of the sugared treats within a block of that sign. In the ordinary scheme of things, fruits permeated with sugar syrup don’t set my mouth watering, but I’m a sucker for a local specialty, so I got some confited mirabelles (a kind of small plum), a bag of assorted fruits, and assorted pâtes de fruits.

The taste experience of the candied fruit did nothing to change my mind about that class of sweets, but reading an old article in the New York Times gave me some appreciation of their aesthetic qualities. Back in the day (like, Eleanor of Aquitaine’s day), it must have been amazing to see fruit that looked as if it had been transformed into colored glass. It’s also probably not easy to maintain the integrity of each piece of fruit, so that after being covered in boiling sugar syrup it still looks essentially like itself.

But still — if you’ve tasted sugar, you’ve tasted these. I was much happier with my humble bag of pâtes de fruits, small nuggets of sweetened fruit paste that are like the grand ancestors of Chuckles, except that the flavors of real fruit sing out strong. The raspberry flavor was so intense, I was checking my teeth for seeds, but my favorite was the grapefruit, which perfectly captured its bitter sweetness.

Pâtes de fruits look pretty easy to make at home — you use pectin or gelatin, and it’s ready in a day, rather than in a month. I have my eye on recipes for pineapple-lime, and good old apricot.

While in Apt, I also rounded out my collection of bowls from Atelier Buisson-Kessler. There are many pottery shops in Provence, but nothing we saw matched these wares in delicacy paired with gorgeous color.