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Lemon Caramel
Break half a pound of loaf sugar to pieces. Barely cover it with water, and boil it to the snap (see SUGAR BOILING); then keep stirring it until it becomes slightly coloured. Draw it near the side, and add six or seven drops of the essence of lemon--the quantity to be regulated by taste. Pour the mixture upon an oiled baking-sheet; mark it in squares with the back of a knife, and let it get quite cold. Time, about half an hour. Probable cost, 3d.
A hard lemon caramel — closer to a boiled sweet than to what a modern cook means by caramel. The whole dish turns on the sugar temperature, so a thermometer replaces the old finger-and-cold-water tests.
- "Boil to the snap"The snap, or hard crack, is 300-310F (150-155C). A drop of syrup dripped into cold water should set into a brittle thread that cracks rather than bends. Below that the squares stay tacky and will weld together in the tin.
- Loaf sugarRefined cane sugar sold in solid cones, broken up with sugar nippers. Ordinary granulated sugar is the same thing in a more convenient form; half a pound is about 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons.
- Barely cover with waterRoughly 4-5 tablespoons for this quantity. The water is only there to dissolve the sugar evenly at the start; all of it boils off before the snap.
- Do not stir at the boilStirring -- modern practice is to stir only until the sugar has dissolved and then leave the syrup alone, since stirring a boiling syrup throws crystals up the pan side and can seed the batch grainy. Note that the recipe's "keep stirring" comes after the snap has been reached, when the water has boiled off and the sugar is colouring; swirling the pan will do the same job.
- Getting the colourThe pale amber the recipe wants comes just above the snap, around 320-340F, and it develops fast. Take the pan off the heat the moment it colours; residual heat in the pan will carry it further, and burnt sugar turns bitter.
- Essence of lemonThis is lemon oil, not the diluted lemon extract sold today. Six or seven drops of true lemon oil is right for half a pound of sugar; if using a modern extract you will need appreciably more, and it should go in off the heat so the alcohol does not flash away the flavour.
- Oiled baking-sheetA neutral oil wiped thin, or a silicone mat. Pour to about a quarter-inch thick.
- Marking the squaresScore while the sheet is set but still warm and slightly yielding — perhaps two or three minutes after pouring. Once cold it will shatter along whatever lines it pleases rather than yours.
- Yield and costAbout 8 oz of sweets, some two dozen small squares. Threepence was a genuinely cheap confection in the period; sugar and a bottle of essence were the only outlay.
Boiled sugar sweets flavoured with a distilled citrus oil were a staple of the Victorian domestic confectioner, and the recipe cross-refers the reader to the book's SUGAR BOILING entry for the test. "Caramel" here keeps its older, narrower sense of sugar cooked until it browns, well before the word came to mean the soft milk-and-butter chew now sold under the name. Essence of lemon was pressed or distilled oil from the peel, sold by chemists and grocers by the small bottle, and it was strong enough that recipes counted it in drops. That the whole batch is costed at threepence reflects how far refined sugar had fallen in price by the later nineteenth century, once beet sugar and colonial cane had between them turned a luxury into a household commodity.