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Black Currant Lozenges
Mix two ounces of brown sugar with half a pint of black currant juice. Put the liquid into an enamelled saucepan, add a table-spoonful of dissolved isinglass, and let it simmer gently for three-quarters of an hour. Pour it over small plates in layers about the eighth of an inch in thickness, and let these plates be kept in a screen, a cool oven, or any warm place until the mixture is dry and hard, then take it off, keep it in a tin box with a sheet of paper between each layer, and stamp it into shapes as required. These lozenges are very palatable and excellent for coughs, colds, and sore throats. Probable cost, 2d. per ounce.
This is a fruit pastille rather than a boiled sweet: the setting comes from isinglass and slow drying, not from sugar cooked to a hard-crack stage. Plan on two or three days of drying and expect a chewy, leathery lozenge.
- The hinge: drying, not boilingThe simmer only concentrates the juice and disperses the isinglass. Everything depends on drying the thin layers slowly and evenly at low heat; rush it and the surface skins over while the inside stays tacky.
- IsinglassIsinglass is collagen prepared from fish swim bladders — sturgeon was the most prized source, though cod and other fish were also used — sold in leaf or shred form and long a standard clarifying and setting agent. It is a specialist item today; leaf or powdered gelatine gives a comparable set. "A table-spoonful of dissolved isinglass" means the liquid after soaking and melting, so the actual dry weight is unstated — reckon on roughly the gelatine you would use to set half a pint of liquid firmly, about 3 to 4 leaves.
- Half a pintAn imperial half pint is 10 fl oz, or about 285 ml — a little under a US cup and a quarter. Two ounces of brown sugar is a quarter to a third of a cup packed.
- An enamelled saucepanSpecified because bare iron and copper react with fruit acid, dulling the colour and leaving a metallic taste. Stainless steel or a modern enamelled pan does the same job.
- "A screen, a cool oven, or any warm place"A screen was a shield set near the fire to hold plates in gentle radiant heat. A Victorian "cool oven" had no fixed figure; for this purpose use the lowest heat your oven will hold, with the door ajar — a dehydrator at its lowest setting or an oven with only the light on works as well.
- Stamping the shapesFully dried sheets an eighth of an inch thick will crack rather than cut cleanly. It is easier to score the sheet into squares or lozenges while it is still slightly pliable and snap it along the lines once hard.
- Yield and keepingHalf a pint of juice reduced and dried gives only a few ounces of finished sweets — a small tinful. The paper between layers is not optional; the surfaces stay hygroscopic and will fuse in humid weather.
- On the medicinal claimThese soothe a sore throat the way any sugar-and-gelatine pastille does, by coating the throat. Treat them as confectionery.
Lozenges of this kind sit on the boundary between the confectioner's shop and the apothecary's counter, where medicated pastilles — gum arabic, isinglass or tragacanth bound with sugar and a flavouring — were made up by hand well into the nineteenth century. Blackcurrant earned its reputation for coughs and colds long before anyone could explain it in terms of vitamin C, and the association survived into twentieth-century Britain in blackcurrant throat sweets and cordials. Cooks in much of the United States may struggle to find the fruit at all: Ribes plantings were widely banned in the early 1900s as a host of white pine blister rust, and though restrictions have eased in many states the berry never regained its place there.