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Sea Foam and Cream Candies
SEA FOAM and cream candies are delicious, and very easily made by the home candy-maker. Sea foam candies are those in which the white of egg is used, while the cream candies are made much after the same manner as fondant is made, except that cream is used instead of water.
GINGER CREAMS Place in a saucepan two cupfuls of granulated sugar, one-half cupful of cream, one-fourth teaspoonful of cream of tartar or a few drops of acetic acid and one-half teaspoonful of glycerine. Boil until it forms a soft ball when dropped into cold water or to about 240 degrees; then pour the syrup on a large platter and when it has become slightly cool cover with candied ginger cut into thin strips--about one-half cupful will be enough. Work with a wooden spoon from the sides of the dish until it becomes creamy and smooth; then gather up in the hands and knead thoroughly. Roll out into a sheet and cut into thin bars, laying a strip of ginger on each bar and pressing it in with the finger.
A straightforward cream fondant flavored with candied ginger. The section opens with a definition of terms, then gives one worked recipe; everything depends on the pour temperature and on letting the syrup cool before you agitate it.
- The hinge: let it cool before workingIf you stir the syrup while it is still hot, it grains coarsely and turns sandy. Pour it out, leave it undisturbed until the surface is barely warm to the touch (about 110F), then work it with the spoon; it will turn opaque and creamy within a few minutes.
- 240F means soft-ballUse a candy thermometer and take the reading 238-240F. The cold-water test the recipe gives is the same stage — a ball that holds its shape in the water but flattens between the fingers.
- Acetic acidPeriod recipes call for a dilute acetic acid solution, which is stronger than table vinegar; a few drops of distilled white vinegar is not a like-for-like substitute, and glacial acetic acid is a laboratory chemical that has no place here. The cream of tartar is the easier option and does the same job — inverting a little of the sugar so the fondant stays fine-grained.
- GlycerineBuy food-grade glycerin, sold with cake-decorating supplies or at a pharmacy. It is a humectant and keeps the finished creams soft for several days rather than drying hard.
- CreamHousehold cream of the period ran lower in fat than modern heavy cream, roughly in the light-cream range. Light cream, or half heavy cream and half whole milk, is closer than heavy cream, which can make the batch greasy.
- Pan and platterUse a heavy 2-quart saucepan — milk sugars scorch fast — and stir only until the sugar dissolves, then leave it alone. A marble slab, a sheet pan, or a large platter all work for the pour; warm china is less likely to crack than cold.
- Candied gingerUse the firm crystallized kind rather than the wet stem ginger packed in syrup, which will bleed liquid into the fondant. Shake off excess sugar before cutting the strips.
- YieldTwo cups of sugar plus the ginger gives something over a pound of candy, cut into small bars. Store them in a tin between layers of waxed paper.
- Sea foam, for referenceThe egg-white candies named in the opening line belong to the same family as divinity, sea foam usually being the brown-sugar version, and the syrup is taken higher than fondant — to the firm- or hard-ball stage — before being beaten into the whites. No sea foam recipe is given in this excerpt.
Fondant work of this kind was the backbone of home candy-making manuals in the first decades of the twentieth century, when granulated sugar had become cheap and reliable and a thermometer was within reach of an ordinary kitchen. The distinction the author draws — egg-white candies called sea foam, cream-boiled candies called creams — follows a vocabulary that seems to have been shared with professional confectioners. Candied ginger was an imported luxury, and its appearance in a home recipe marks the point at which such goods had become common enough in American groceries to be cut up and pressed into a homemade bar. Glycerine, likewise, was a pharmacy staple pressed into culinary service, and the household books passed the trick along.