Among other rare skills, Camilla Wynne can stop time in its tracks. As one of Canada’s only Master Preservers, Wynne makes shelf-stable delicacies of our most perishable perishables—jams, jellies, pickles, and more. She’s also an award-winning author of three books, a versatile cooking teacher, and member of the beloved band Sunset Rubdown.

Wynne’s third book, Nature’s Candy, takes her mastery over fruit to a different end: Candying. As in her last, Jam Bake, Nature’s Candy is more than an instruction manual. Rather, it coaxes us towards the luxury of process and the nuances of celebration. 

Featuring stunning photographs by Mickaël A. Bandassak, Nature’s Candy is a playfully written, casually astonishing cookbook filled with recipes for candied fruit and show-stopping goods to make with it. Recently, I dropped by Wynne’s Toronto apartment to (watch her) candy fruit while discussing the new book and everything that went into it—including, possibly, wasps.

Naomi Skwarna: Tell me what you’re doing today.

Camilla Wynne: I’m doing a quick candy on the kiwi and the pineapple, and then I’m also draining some clementines I candied last night, to dry them.

Are those whole candied figs? Those look wonderful.

Yeah! These ones got treated with a calcium chloride bath, which is a really caustic substance that firms the cell walls of fruits and vegetables.

Is that a dehydrator?

Yes! Not one of the fancy ones, though. It’s like the one from the infomercial. Instead of Saturday cartoons, I would watch the Ronco infomercial because I wanted one so bad.

Speaking of being an old soul child, I love the part in your introduction where you talked about going to the nut store as a kid to get a ring of candied pineapple. It was the nuts for me, though.

What was your top nut?

I was very into almonds.

Wow, that’s so austere.

I thought they were elegant! I think I was probably a little bit intimidated by candied fruit for reasons that you write about.

There’s a lot of bad candied fruit.

They put it in cereal, dried fruit. Tiny little bits. I wasn’t fond of raisins.

Really? Hmm. I want fruit in any possible format.

Let’s talk about Nature’s Candy! I like that you open the book with this Rilke quote from Letters to a Young Poet— “That something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.”

That was one of my favourite things that I’ve done. And one of my favourite books.

It’s such a bold way to start. It made me think about how normal it feels for recipes and cookbooks to be marketed as, like—

Easy? Yeah. That was the idea, in a way, to defend myself from the haters in advance.

It really sets the tone! It also made me think about an aspect of your, I guess, ethos? Your relationship to time, slowing time, and difficulty as an avenue to pleasure. When did you first encounter that quote?

Seventh grade. I have half of pages of that book turned down, the same copy from seventh grade. My English teacher gave it to me. For me, it’s kind of revelatory. You do something hard, partly because it’s hard, and if you complete the task, you get a sense of accomplishment from having done the hard thing. Why would you ever only do easy things?

It sounds like it spoke to a feeling that you already had.

That was the first time I thought of it that way. There’s another one, “Maybe all of the dragons in our lives are really princesses just waiting for us to love them,” or something. That one really got me as well.

So, you open with this statement of difficulty ahead—

It’s an acknowledgement that this isn’t the norm. I mean, people are obsessed with sourdough and things like that. There’re things that get a pass to for being difficult, but candy doesn’t get that same [treatment]. It’s interesting, though, because there’re so many traditional foods for celebrations that call for candied fruit, worldwide. The idea that we have practically no good quality candied fruit readily available in Canada and the US, and also no one knows how to do it? It’s so absurd.

Maybe the bar is low in late-stage capitalism. Like, of course, you feel a sense of accomplishment if you get a meal on the table in twenty minutes, I get it! But also, if you make homemade candied fruit to give it as a gift, the sense of accomplishment is much greater, right? It breeds generosity. No one’s sitting on all this just for themselves.

Yeah, you make it to give away.

Exactly, you make it to share. Would you like a piece of cake? Don’t feel obliged.

Oh, I’d love a piece of cake. You gave me cake last time, too.

You should always have cake in the house if anyone comes over. It’s rude not to! My granny’s wisdom.

It’s good advice! There’s something about committing yourself to process that feels very antithetical to the more “productive” mindset.

I think the whole work of baking, making jam, making candied fruit, puts my brain and body in kind of a meditative state. It’s the quiet observation and repetitive movements. That’s why I like this kind of work; you’re like a piece of machinery, in a way that isn’t dehumanizing.

Do you have any issues with perfectionism?

I’m like a perfectionist junior. I’m much more comfortable now with the inevitability of mistakes. Playing shows or teaching classes, you can only control so many variables. With teaching, any technical error is good, because those happen to people in real life all the time. Like if the butter separates in the toffee while I’m teaching, it’s like, “Perfect! Now, let me show you how to fix it.”

Have you always been a patient person, or have the fields that you’ve chosen to work in cultivated it?

I’ve always had a certain amount of innate patience, I guess. Why would that be? I think there’s something about growing up in the ’80s without phones and not having a TV for a long time. I was an only child with working parents, so I spent a lot of time being kind of bored, which is pretty good for you, to a certain extent. It’s so funny to me now—the idea of being bored! I read a lot, too, and still do.

You seem very comfortable with things being, I don’t want to say slow—

That’s true! Yeah. I mean, listen, I didn’t have a kid till I was forty-one. There’re also life circumstances where you have no choice but to be patient.

You also slow time in candying and in preserving. Delaying decay, holding flavour. But it takes time to stop time!

My grannies did all that stuff. They baked and preserved and I think being around that as a child gave me an appreciation for the results. And if you like the results, then generally speaking, you have to develop an affection for the processes that create them as well.

In the book’s forward, Tim Mazurek mentions that in the midst of extolling the virtues of candied fruit, you’ll “probably be wearing a ridiculously good outfit.” He’s so right—you have an incredible aesthetic, not just in what you make. Is your sense of dress at all aligned with how you feel about preserving and candy making? And on a practical level, how do you manage around all this hot sugar and melted butter?

I love clothes, and I’ve always thought that you shouldn’t save them for special occasions. You should always wear your good things. And once you have a kid? You just have to be like “I love this white outfit. I’m gonna wear it today. Is it going to get fucked up? Yes.” You just need a really good stain remover.

Which one do you use?

OxiClean gel, with the nubs. There’s no comparison in life. OxiClean gel with the nubs, the nubs.

I wish I could trust myself to wear nice things! I feel like I’m always about to lean against something filthy.

I definitely do that too! Once I used the sleeve of my favorite Ganni jacket to open a wood stove, forgetting that it was a nylon jacket…

Oh nooo. Did you get burned?

No, just the jacket. I burst into tears! But the secret of life is to have a really excellent tailor. He made it look like it had never been damaged.

Tailoring is a gift. Do you find that your sense of style has changed? Like, do you feel like you still want to wear the same clothes that you wore five years ago?

Some things, I do. But I’m a little bit ruthless with the closet. If I haven’t worn something for a year or two, I’m like—

You get rid of it?

Which, you know, I hated that about my mom! She’ll get rid of my things, and then I’ll see an old picture and be like, why would you get rid of that? Definitely my style’s changed, plus there’s just the practical aspects of everyday life. Biking is my main mode of transportation, which kind of limits what I can wear, even though I try not to let it. But speaking of that, I wore my favorite Ulla Johnson dress to a dinner for my partner’s residence union, and I biked there as fast as I could. The whole back of it got covered in bike grease. But you know what?

The OxiClean got it out.

Yeah man, that’s why I can bike in white jeans. I don’t care. I got that stuff. You can do anything.

You’re blowing my mind.

I don’t like to be too fussy about things. If you’re going to spend lots of money on something, you should probably get your money’s worth out of it!

Have you ever candied something you didn’t mean to candy? 

Not to my knowledge, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Those figs are probably full of wasps.

Oh, that’s right ☹️. Something you mention in the book is that many of your recipes make reference to someone you met or an experience you had travelling, teaching, eating. Can you tell me a little more about your sources of inspiration?

There’s a recipe that’s inspired by a line out of the James Beard biography that I really loved. You don’t read about candied fruit very often, so when you do, it’s cool! It was also fun to comb through my grannies’ old recipe books to find inspiration, because that was a time when candied fruit was more widely used.

Will you be making anything special for your book tour? You have some interesting events planned.

I’ve had to do a lot of menu planning for the events, and sometimes I’m like, “these are weird recipes.” Like, there’s going to be a cold orange soaked in amaro and covered in candied peel. I’m certainly not serving that at a book talk, but I’d love to see desserts like that come back. I’d be thrilled if someone gave me a denuded orange covered in candied peel for dessert!

You mentioned that your grannies’ recipes called for candied fruit. Was there a time when that was more common—making weird fruit things?

I think so, yes! Fruit is so easily accessible to us now that we take it for granted a little bit. A hundred or more years ago, it was really special to get, like, a pear. There are some restaurants, like Chez Panisse, that brought that back a bit. But those specific fruits aren’t always accessible to many of us who aren’t affluent and living in California! I think that you can just take a whatever orange, actually, and make something really cool. That’s always been important to me, too. I want people to be growing really beautiful fruit, I appreciate it. But most of us don’t have that accessible. You can make really good jam out of frozen raspberries from No Frills, great candied orange peel out of any oranges. That’s really cool, because if ever you find yourself with something of higher quality, then you’re like, well, just imagine what can be made! These are practices that can redeem some fruits that aren’t the best, necessarily.

Can the pear be redeemed? I haven’t been able to find a good one in years.

Do you know Jonah Campbell? You have to hear him talk about pears.

Does he hate them?

No, he loves them. But he’s so particular, always tortured. It is very difficult to find a good pear.

Nothing more treacherous than a pear.

We’re in the season for Flemish Beauties. That’s an excellent pear.