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Almond Rock
Blanch three-quarters of a pound of sweet almonds, and dry them in a slow oven, turning them occasionally, and taking care that they do not burn. Put half a pound of loaf sugar and a quarter of a pint of water in a small copper preserving pan, and boil them together until the syrup is very thick and begins to whiten. Then add a tea-spoonful of lemon juice, and stir constantly over a brisk fire for a few minutes. Try it constantly by dropping a little into a basin of cold water, and as soon as it solidifies immediately and snaps between the teeth, lift the pan off the fire and stir in the almonds. Have ready a baking tin very lightly buttered, pour in the almond rock, spread it out evenly, mark it in divisions, and cut up into slabs as soon as it is partly set.
A hard-crack sugar candy with whole toasted almonds, written before thermometers were standard kitchen equipment. The whole recipe turns on reading the sugar correctly.
- The hinge: hard crackThe cold-water test described is the hard-crack stage, 300-310F (150-155C). Below that the rock stays tacky and chewy; above about 320F the sugar begins to colour toward caramel and, if pushed, turns bitter. A candy thermometer removes the guesswork, but keep testing in cold water as well since sugar climbs the last twenty degrees very fast.
- Quarter of a pintCassell's is British, so a quarter pint is 5 fl oz, about 150 ml. With 8 oz of sugar that is a generous amount of water, which simply means a longer boil; nothing is lost.
- Loaf sugarSugar sold in hard cones, broken up with nippers, and prized as the purest grade available. Ordinary granulated white sugar is its direct modern equivalent.
- Slow oven for the almondsRoughly 275-300F (140-150C); the Victorian "slow oven" covered a range rather than one setting. Twelve to fifteen minutes with a shake or two should dry and lightly colour them. Almonds that are still warm are less likely to chill the syrup and stall the pour.
- The lemon juiceNot for flavour. The acid inverts a portion of the sucrose and stops the batch crystallising into a grainy mass. Do not leave it out, and do not add much more than the teaspoon specified or the rock will stay soft.
- The copper panUnlined copper was the sugar boiler's standard because it conducts heat evenly. With lemon juice in the pan, heavy stainless steel is the safer modern choice. Give the syrup a pan with generous headroom, since it boils up.
- Marking the divisionsScore the slab while it is still flexible, which the recipe puts as "partly set"; how long that takes depends on the thickness of the slab and the warmth of the room. Wait too long and it shatters at random; too soon and the lines close up.
- Yield and keepingAbout 1 lb 4 oz of finished rock. Store airtight with a desiccant sachet if you have one, as the invert sugar draws moisture and the surface goes sticky within a day or two in a humid kitchen.
Almond rock belongs to the confectioner's branch of Victorian cookery, the part of the household repertoire that overlapped with the sweet shop. "Rock" simply describes the texture, a sugar boiled to the brittle stage rather than to the soft fondant or caramel stages, and the same technique underlies barley sugar, butterscotch and the seaside rock sold at English resorts. Sugar boiling was taught as a graded skill: the cook learned to identify thread, blow, feather, soft ball, hard ball, crack and caramel by eye and by the cold-water test, since domestic thermometers were expensive and rare well into the century. Sweet almonds, imported from Spain, Italy and the south of France, were among the more costly store-cupboard items, which is why the book is careful to warn against scorching three-quarters of a pound of them.