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Acidulated Drops
Clarify some sugar as follows: to every two pounds of sugar allow one pint of water and the white of one egg; put the sugar and water into a saucepan, and stir them over the fire until the former is thoroughly dissolved; add the white of the egg, and boil, skimming constantly until the syrup looks quite clear. Remove it from the fire, strain it, and return it to the saucepan. Mix with it tartaric acid or lemon-juice, according to taste, and let all boil together until the syrup crackles when put into cold water. Have ready a well-oiled dish, and drop the sugar as regularly and quickly as possible into it. If there is any appearance of the syrup boiling over, two or three drops of oil, or a little cold water, may be put in. Time to prepare, about half an hour. Probable cost, 1s.
This is a hard-crack boiled sugar candy — the Victorian ancestor of the acid drop. The technique is sound, but two steps are now redundant and one is the hinge on which the whole batch turns.
- Skip the egg-white clarificationBeating egg white into syrup and skimming it was how nineteenth-century cooks removed the impurities in unrefined loaf and lump sugar. Modern granulated sugar is already pure; dissolve it in the water and go straight to boiling, and add a pinch of cream of tartar or a spoonful of glucose syrup instead if you want insurance against graining.
- "Crackles in cold water" means 300-310FThat is the hard-crack stage: a drizzle of syrup dropped into cold water sets into brittle threads that snap rather than bend. A sugar thermometer removes the guesswork, and below about 300F the drops will stay tacky and slump.
- Add the acid last, off the heatTartaric acid or lemon juice inverts sucrose, and a long boil with acid present gives a syrup that will not set hard and turns sticky within a day. Take the pan off the fire, let it stop bubbling for a few seconds, then stir in the acid — about 1/2 to 1 teaspoon of tartaric acid, dissolved in a few drops of water, per pound of sugar — and drop at once.
- Proportions and yieldTwo pounds of sugar to one pint (British pint, 20 fl oz) of water is roughly 900 g to 570 ml; almost all of that water boils away, so the finished sweets weigh not far short of the 2 lb of sugar you started with.
- The dropping surfaceAn oiled dish works, but a lightly oiled marble slab or a silicone mat is easier, and the syrup sets in seconds so the pan should be kept just warm enough to pour. Working in two batches, or standing the pan in a bowl of hot water, saves the tail end of the syrup from setting solid in the pan.
- The boiling-over remedyThe two or three drops of oil are a genuine anti-foaming trick and still work. Cold water also works but knocks the temperature back; oil is the better choice at this stage.
- HumidityAcid drops are hygroscopic and go sticky in damp air. Make them on a dry day and store them in an airtight tin, dusted with a little icing sugar or wrapped individually.
- "Probable cost, 1s."One shilling. The book gives a 'probable cost' with its recipes as a guide to household budgeting; here it covers the sugar, the egg and the acid together.
Acid drops belong to the great age of British boiled sugar confectionery, when falling sugar prices after the mid-nineteenth century put sweet-making within reach of both the domestic kitchen and a rapidly growing trade in penny sweets. The sourness comes from tartaric acid, a by-product of winemaking that became widely available as a cheap commercial powder in the same period and turned up in baking powders, effervescent drinks and lemonade as well as sweets; where a household had no acid on hand, lemon juice served, as here. The clarifying-with-egg-white step that opens the recipe is older still, inherited from the sugar-boiler's craft when sugar arrived as loaves of varying purity and every syrup had to be cleaned before it could be brought to a clear, high boil. The ladder of sugar stages - thread, ball, crack - was foundational knowledge, the sort of thing a cook was expected to judge by hand and eye long before thermometers were common in domestic kitchens.