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Horehound Candy
Boil two ounces of dried horehound in a pint and a half water for about half an hour; strain and add three and a half pounds brown sugar. Boil over a hot fire until it is sufficiently hard, pour out in flat, well-greased tin trays, and mark into sticks or small squares with a knife, as soon as it is cool enough to retain its shape.
A straightforward hard candy whose only difficulty is that the original gives no temperature. Everything else is a matter of sourcing the herb and reading the sugar.
- The hinge: cook to 300F"Sufficiently hard" means the hard-crack stage, 300-310F on a candy thermometer. Test the old way by dropping a little syrup into cold water: it should form threads that snap rather than bend. Brown sugar darkens as it cooks, so colour tells you nothing here.
- Dried horehoundMarrubium vulgare, sold as dried horehound herb by herb suppliers and some tea shops. Two ounces of dried leaf to a pint and a half of water is a very strong, frankly bitter decoction; halve it if you want a gentler candy. Do not substitute black horehound (Ballota nigra), a different plant of the same family.
- Yield and scaleThree and a half pounds of sugar makes roughly three pounds of finished candy, which is a great deal. Quartering the recipe (14 oz sugar, 6 oz water, 1/2 oz horehound) gives a manageable batch in a 2-quart pan.
- Pan sizeBoiling sugar syrup foams up sharply, and brown sugar more than most. Use a heavy pan several times the depth of the syrup, and do not stir once it is boiling.
- Brown sugarNineteenth-century brown sugar varied widely in refinement and is not directly matched by any modern packaged product. Light brown sugar is the safer choice here; dark brown will overwhelm the herb.
- The trays"Flat tin trays, well-greased" means shallow rimmed sheet pans. Butter or oil them heavily, or line with a silicone mat, and pour to about a quarter inch. Score with an oiled knife while the sheet is still pliable but no longer liquid; wait too long and it will shatter instead of breaking on the lines.
- StorageHorehound candy takes up moisture badly. Dust the pieces with a little powdered sugar or wrap each one, and keep them airtight; unwrapped, they weld into a single mass within days.
- A note on the herbHorehound is a traditional cough remedy, not a mild flavouring. It is generally advised against in pregnancy and in quantity, which is worth knowing before you eat candy by the handful.
Horehound is a grey, bitter mint-family plant that followed European settlers across North America and naturalised along roadsides and in dooryards, which is why a nineteenth-century Ohio household could treat it as something simply to be had rather than bought. The candy sits in the confectionery chapter of Buckeye Cookery but belongs equally to the domestic medicine cabinet, and horehound's reputation for loosening a chest cough is old enough to appear in classical and medieval herbals. The name is usually traced to Old English words for "hoary" or "grey," describing the plant's felted leaves, though the second element has never been settled. Commercial horehound drops outlasted the homemade version and are still sold, which makes this one of the few Victorian confections a modern reader may already know the taste of.