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Apple Sugar
Boil a pint of apple-juice (see APPLE-JUICE) with two pounds of loaf sugar, until it becomes brittle as soon as it is dropped in cold water. Then pour on a well-oiled dish, draw it out into twisted sticks; dry them, and keep them in a tin box. Time to boil, about twenty minutes. Probable cost, 1s. per pound.
This is a pulled sugar candy in the Victorian confectioner's style: a fruit syrup boiled to the hard-crack stage, then worked by hand into twisted sticks. The hinge is the temperature, and a thermometer removes all the guesswork the original leaves in.
- The stage that matters"Brittle as soon as it is dropped in cold water" is hard crack, 300-310F (149-154C). Below about 295F the sticks will stay tacky and slump; above 320F the sugar begins to caramelise and the apple flavour is lost under bitterness.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a cone and broken up as needed. Ordinary granulated sugar is the equivalent. Two pounds is about 4 1/2 cups.
- A pint of apple-juiceCassell's pint is the imperial 20 fl oz, so about 2 1/2 US cups. The recipe cross-refers to the book's own apple-juice entry; fresh pressed and strained juice, or unsweetened bottled juice, will serve. Cloudy juice will throw more scum, so skim it in the first few minutes.
- Twenty minutes is optimisticTwenty minutes may be optimistic -- with 20 fl oz of juice to drive off, it can take considerably longer depending on your pan and the heat. Judge by the thermometer, not the clock.
- Pan and acidUse a heavy-bottomed pan considerably taller than the syrup depth; apple juice foams up. The acid in the juice helps inhibit crystallisation, but wash any sugar crystals down the sides with a wet brush early on and then leave the syrup alone.
- Pulling the sugarOil a marble slab or a heavy baking sheet, pour out, and let the mass cool at the edges until it can be folded to the centre. It must be handled while still hot enough to burn badly, so heatproof gloves are worth having. Cut and twist quickly, as it stiffens fast.
- Drying and storage"Dry them" means leaving the sticks in a warm dry place for an hour or so. This candy is hygroscopic and will turn sticky in humid air; the tin box is not decoration, and a tight tin with the sticks separated by parchment is the modern equivalent.
- YieldClose to 2 lb of finished candy, since it is essentially the sugar with the water boiled away; the number of sticks depends on how thin you pull them.
- The cost note"Probable cost, 1s. per pound" is a Victorian market price the book gives throughout, not an instruction. It is useful only as a period comparison.
Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery is a British household compendium arranged alphabetically, and it treats apples exhaustively: juice, jelly, marmalade, fritters, and this piece of domestic sugar work. Boiled sugar confectionery of this kind long belonged to the confectioner's trade, but cheaper refined sugar and improved kitchen ranges brought it within reach of ordinary households, and cookery dictionaries printed the ladder of sugar stages -- thread, ball, crack, caramel -- tested by dropping syrup into cold water, domestic sugar thermometers being far from universal. Fruit-flavoured pulled sticks and "barley sugar" twists were a staple of that repertoire, and apple juice as the whole liquid would have made thrifty use of windfalls or the pressings left from jelly-making.