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Orange-Flower Candy
Put one pound of doubly-refined loaf sugar into a saucepan with half a pint of water, and boil gently for ten minutes. Throw in two ounces of freshly-gathered orange-flowers, and leave them in the boiling syrup for five minutes, then turn them into a bowl, and let them remain for two days. Boil the syrup once more until it rises high in the pan; strain it upon sheets of paper which have been placed upon large flat dishes, and loosen it from the paper before it is quite cold. Store the candy in canisters until wanted for use; it will keep good some months. Probable cost, uncertain, orange-flowers being seldom offered for sale.
A sugar-boiling recipe rather than a baked one: the flowers only perfume the syrup, and everything depends on reading the sugar correctly at the second boil.
- The hinge: "rises high in the pan"The old cue that most of the water has boiled away. For a sheet that sets brittle and lifts from paper the sugar needs to be somewhere near the hard-crack stage, roughly 300-310F on a thermometer. Much below that the sheet stays tacky and will never lift from the paper; much above it the sugar takes on colour and the orange-flower scent burns off.
- Doubly-refined loaf sugarSugar was sold as hard cones broken up with nippers, and "doubly-refined" meant the whitest, least molasses-bearing grade. Ordinary granulated white sugar is the modern equivalent and needs no clarifying.
- MeasuresOne pound of sugar is about 2 1/4 cups; half a pint here is the imperial half-pint, 10 fl oz, so about 1 1/4 cups of water. Two ounces of blossoms is a large quantity of very light petals.
- The flowersThese are the blossoms of bitter or sweet orange, and they must be unsprayed and from a tree you know. Florists' citrus is not food. If you have none, orange-flower water stirred in off the heat at the end gives a similar perfume, though the recipe as written assumes access to fresh blossom.
- The two-day restNot idleness. The syrup is drawing the aromatics out of the petals by slow infusion, in the same way a cold-steeped flavouring works. Cover the bowl so it does not pick up kitchen smells, and keep it somewhere cool.
- Strain properlyThe recipe strains only after the second boil, pouring the syrup through onto the paper. Petal fragments left in the syrup can scorch in the very hot sugar, so passing it through a fine sieve or muslin before that second boil is worth considering.
- Sheets of paperUse baking parchment or a silicone mat on rimmed trays, and pour thin. "Loosen it before it is quite cold" is the critical timing: warm, the sheet flexes and releases; fully cold, it shatters or welds to the surface.
- Yield and storageA pound of sugar gives roughly a pound of brittle candy, enough to fill two modest jars once snapped into pieces. The "canisters" matter more than the recipe suggests. Hard sugar work goes sticky in humid air, so use an airtight tin or jar and it will indeed keep for months.
Orange-flower was one of the dominant perfumes of European confectionery from the seventeenth century onward, standing where vanilla stands now: distilled as orange-flower water, candied as blossom, and stirred into creams, wafers and ratafias. The blossom came from the bitter orange grown around the Mediterranean, and English cooks who had a greenhouse orangery could gather their own; the recipe says only that the flowers are freshly gathered and seldom sold. Cassell's closing note is the giveaway about late Victorian shopping habits: the compilers priced almost every recipe in the book to the penny, and admitting the cost is "uncertain, orange-flowers being seldom offered for sale" marks this as a country-house or conservatory recipe rather than something a town cook could shop for.