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Cinnamon Tablet
This is made in the same way as cinnamon drops, but instead of being scored into small squares or formed into drops, it is marked into squares of about one inch and a half.
This is a cross-reference rather than a standalone method: it is the cinnamon drop mixture, spread and cut large instead of piped small. A few notes on what that implies in a modern kitchen.
- You need the parent recipeNothing here is makeable without "Cinnamon Drops" in hand. Drop mixtures of this class are generally a stiff paste of sifted sugar and ground cinnamon bound with egg white, worked smooth and either dropped from a bag or spread and marked into pieces to dry, but the exact proportions must be taken from the parent entry rather than assumed.
- What "tablet" meansIn Victorian confectionery a tablet is simply a flat cut lozenge, not the Scottish boiled-milk fudge of the same name. The whole difference between drops and tablet here is the shape and size of the finished piece.
- Mark it while softThe hinge of the method is the marking. Score the sheet into 1½-inch squares while the paste is still pliable but no longer tacky; once it has dried through it shatters rather than cutting, and the edges crumble.
- Thickness matters more than the recipe saysThe original gives no depth; a consistent sheet of around 1/4 inch is a reasonable working choice. Squares this wide dry from the surface inward, and an uneven sheet gives pieces that are chalky at one end and damp at the other.
- Drying, not bakingPieces of this kind would have been left to dry rather than baked. In a modern kitchen a very low oven with the door ajar, or a dehydrator, does the job faster; a normal baking heat will colour and blister the sugar.
- Uncooked egg whiteIf your version of the drop mixture is bound with raw egg white and never heated, use pasteurised whites. Powdered egg white or meringue powder reconstituted to a paste behaves much the same here.
- CinnamonPeriod recipes of this type sometimes use oil of cinnamon rather than ground bark, and the two are not interchangeable by volume; the oil is measured in drops. Ground cinnamon gives a speckled, slightly gritty tablet; which the parent recipe called for cannot be told from this entry.
- Yield and keepingYield depends on the parent recipe's quantities and on how thick you spread the sheet; a pound of sugar paste at a quarter-inch will give somewhere between two and three dozen 1½-inch squares. Fully dried, they keep for weeks in a tin between layers of paper; any residual moisture and they will stick and go soft.
Sugar tablets, lozenges and drops sat at the border between the confectioner's shop and the apothecary's counter for centuries, and cinnamon was a favourite flavour on both sides of it — pleasant to eat and long credited with settling the stomach. By the time Cassell's was compiled in the late nineteenth century, sifted icing sugar was cheap and reliably fine, which is what made this sort of uncooked sugar paste a plain domestic job rather than a specialist's one: no boiling, no thermometer, just paste, spread, mark and dry. The book's habit of listing several near-identical entries — drops, tablet, lozenges, all one mixture in different shapes — suggests something closer to a shape-and-flavour index than a set of recipes to be read straight through.