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BONBONS, CANDIED (a la Gouffe)
Heat one pound of sugar until it registers forty degrees, then cool it down to thirty-eight degrees, by the addition of some essence to flavour: either aniseed cordial, kirschenwasser, maraschino, or almond may be used. Let it cool, and beat it with a wooden spoon until it forms a paste, when put it in a basin until wanted. Next, get a wooden tray about one foot square and two inches deep, fill it with dry starch finely powdered, and stamp the starch all over with an ornamental cutter, leaving about half an inch between each interstice. Melt part of the paste in a sugar boiler, rub the spout with whiting, and fill the patterns in the starch with the sugar; let it dry for two hours; take them out, brush them to clear away the loose starch, place them in a candy-pan, cover them with some syrup at about thirty-six degrees of heat, and lay over the pan a sheet of paper. Allow the bonbons to stay fifteen hours in a drying closet, then break the top only of the sugar, throw off the syrup, put the bonbons on a wire strainer, and give them their finishing touch by letting them again dry in the hot closet.
This is the starch-mogul method of making liqueur-centred fondant bonbons, written for a professional confectioner with a saccharometer and a drying closet. Nothing in it is impossible at home, but two of its instructions will mislead anyone who reads them as modern kitchen language.
- The "degrees" are not temperatureThe "degrees" are almost certainly not temperature -- forty, thirty-eight and thirty-six degrees are best read as densities on a Baumé saccharometer, the scale commonly used by nineteenth-century confectioners. Roughly, 36°Bé is a specific gravity near 1.33, 38°Bé near 1.35 and 40°Bé near 1.38 — that is, a heavy to very heavy syrup. Read as Fahrenheit or Celsius the recipe makes little sense.
- Where the reading is ambiguousGouffé does not say whether the syrup is floated hot or cooled to a standard temperature before testing, and the difference is several degrees on the scale. If you are working without a saccharometer, the beaten paste in the first stage is simply fondant; a modern equivalent is syrup boiled to 240F and then agitated as it cools.
- The hinge: leave the crusting pan aloneThe whole method turns on the last stage. The dried fondant shapes sit fifteen hours under a covering of 36°Bé syrup so that a thin crystal shell grows over each one. Move the pan, stir it, or use syrup that is too thin and you get either no shell or a dissolved bonbon. The recipe does not say why the sheet of paper is laid over the pan; the usual purposes are to keep dust out and to slow evaporation at the surface, not to seal it.
- Drying the starch"Dry starch finely powdered" means starch (cornflour or wheat starch) driven of its moisture first — spread it in a low oven, around 200F, for an hour or two and let it cool before filling the tray. Damp starch will not hold the stamped impression and will pull moisture out of the deposited fondant unevenly.
- The whiting on the spoutWhiting is powdered chalk, rubbed on the lip of the sugar boiler so the syrup breaks off cleanly instead of trailing threads between the moulds. A modern equivalent is a funnel with a stick stopper, or a piping bag; skip the chalk.
- Kirschenwasser and the flavouringsKirschenwasser is kirsch, the clear cherry spirit. Aniseed cordial and maraschino are still sold; for almond, use a modern almond extract. Note that the recipe uses the flavouring to do double duty: it is what brings the syrup from forty degrees down to thirty-eight.
- Drying closetA confectioner's drying closet ran warm and dry rather than hot. A dehydrator, or an oven held at its gentlest setting with the door propped, is the nearest modern equivalent. Too much heat softens the shell you have just spent fifteen hours growing.
- YieldNo yield is given; the half inch in the text is the gap left between impressions, not their size. A pound of sugar will make several dozen small bonbons. Plan for two full days, most of it waiting.
Gouffé is Jules Gouffé (1807-1877), the Paris chef whose Le Livre de Pâtisserie of 1873 codified French confectionery for a generation of English-speaking cooks; Cassell's credits him by name in the title, as here. The technique itself — stamping shapes into a tray of dry starch and depositing liquid fondant into the hollows — is the ancestor of the industrial starch mogul, the machine that still makes jelly beans and cream-centred sweets today. The crusting stage, in which a supersaturated syrup grows a thin sugar shell over a soft centre, is the same chemistry behind the liqueur cordial cherry. That a general household dictionary of cookery printed a two-day professional process with saccharometer readings says a good deal about late-Victorian ambition: the confectioner's shop was a model to be imitated at home, not merely shopped at.