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Ginger Candy
Make a thin syrup, by boiling one pound of refined loaf sugar with a cupful of water. Flavour it with a tea-spoonful of powdered ginger-root, and colour with a little saffron. As the syrup boils, keep moving it against the side of the pan, and when it turns white it is done enough. Pour it out as quickly as possible, or it will turn to powder. The candy may be put upon sheets of thick writing-paper, which has been laid upon cold dishes. Time, from ten to fifteen minutes. Probable cost, 6d.
This is a grained sugar candy rather than a clear one: the whitening is deliberate crystallisation, brought on by agitation. A few notes on the vessels, the sugar and the moment it turns.
- Loaf sugarRefined loaf sugar was cane sugar broken from a cone, prized for purity. Ordinary granulated white sugar is its direct equivalent, one pound to the cupful of water the recipe calls for (the cup is not a standardised measure here; roughly 8-10 fl oz).
- "Thin syrup" is a misnomerTwo parts sugar to one part water boiled for ten to fifteen minutes reduces well past syrup stage. The book gives no temperature, but a syrup that will grain and set is likely somewhere around the soft-ball range; a candy thermometer removes the guesswork the original leaves you.
- The hinge: when it turns whiteScraping the syrup against the hot side of the pan seeds sugar crystals, and the whole mass clouds within seconds. That is the signal to pour, and it truly will not wait — a grained syrup left on heat stiffens into dry crumb in the pan.
- Pour surfaceSubstitute baking parchment or a lightly oiled marble slab or metal tray for thick writing paper. The recipe does direct that the paper be laid on cold dishes, which speeds setting.
- GingerA teaspoon of ground ginger in a pound of sugar is faint by modern palates; two or three teaspoons gives the heat most people now expect. Ground ginger will also cloud the syrup slightly, which does no harm here.
- SaffronPurely a colourant in this recipe, and an expensive one. A few threads steeped in a spoonful of the hot water will tint the batch yellow; a pinch of turmeric does the same job for less, at the cost of a faint earthiness.
- Yield and keepingA pound of sugar makes roughly a pound of candy once broken up. Store airtight — grained sugar candy draws damp and goes sticky otherwise.
Ginger has been preserved and candied in Britain since the medieval spice trade, and by the Victorian period ground ginger-root was a cheap pantry staple rather than a luxury. The candy belongs to a large family of nineteenth-century household sweets built on the observation that boiled sugar behaves quite differently depending on whether it is left alone or stirred: undisturbed it sets glassy, agitated it goes opaque and short, the same principle behind fudge and Scottish tablet. The visible change from clear to white is a useful guide for cooks working without thermometers. The direction to pour onto thick writing paper is a reminder that greaseproof papers were not yet standard kitchen stock.