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Raspberry Drops
Bruise one pound of ripe raspberries, and strain the juice through a sieve. Dissolve a pound of loaf sugar with a little water, add the raspberry-juice, and boil the syrup to candy height. Drop it at once as evenly and regularly as possible upon paper rubbed over with butter, or upon oiled plates, and dry the drops in a warm place. When hard, take them off with the point of a knife.
A two-ingredient boiled-sugar sweet whose success rests entirely on the thermometer. Everything else is technique.
- "Candy height"An old confectioner's term for one of the highest stages of boiled sugar, at or just past hard crack (somewhere around 300-315F / 150-157C, depending on which nineteenth-century authority you follow). Too low and the drops stay tacky and weep; too high and the sugar colours and the raspberry flavour turns burnt. A sugar thermometer is safer than judging by eye.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined cane sugar broken from a cone, prized because it was clean and free of molasses. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct equivalent; caster and icing sugars are not improvements here.
- How much juice you getA pound of ripe raspberries strained gives roughly 250-300 ml (about a cup) of juice, which is a great deal of liquid to boil off. Reduce the juice on its own by half before it meets the syrup, or dissolve the sugar in the juice alone and skip the added water.
- Fruit acid and inversionRaspberry juice is acidic, and acid inverts sucrose as it boils, which is why these drops set glassy rather than grainy. It also means the finished sweets are hygroscopic and will go sticky in a humid kitchen.
- Buttered paperSubstitute a silicone mat or a sheet of baking parchment on a cold tray. Butter on paper can scorch under 300F sugar and leaves a greasy film on the underside of each drop.
- Dropping the syrupThe syrup thickens within a minute of leaving the heat, so work fast and in small batches, or keep the pan over the lowest possible flame while you drop. A warmed metal teaspoon or a small funnel with a stopper gives more even drops than pouring.
- "Dry in a warm place"Hard-crack sugar sets by cooling, not drying; a warm place simply keeps the surface from picking up atmospheric moisture. Once cold and hard, store the drops between layers of parchment in an airtight tin with a little cornflour dusted around them.
Boiled sugar drops of this kind belong to the long tradition of household confectionery that preceded commercial sweet-making. Confectioners named the stages of boiling sugar by touch and appearance long before thermometers were common in domestic kitchens: thread, pearl, blow, feather, crack and caramel, with "candy height" sitting near the hard end of that scale. Fruit-flavoured drops were popular partly for economy, since a pound of summer raspberries could be turned into something that kept, and partly for medicine, as fruit and herb drops were sold both as sweets and as lozenges for the throat during the nineteenth century. The instruction to lift the cooled drops off with the point of a knife is a reminder that these were made on flat plates and paper rather than in moulds, so no two came out quite alike.