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Rosemary Flowers, to Candy
Soak a little gum-tragacanth (commonly called gum-dragon) in water, and soak some rosemary flowers in the mucilage thus prepared. Lay them on a sheet of paper, and sprinkle powdered loaf sugar over them. Put them in a warm place, and sprinkle powdered sugar over them frequently till they are covered with candy. Store in a cool dry place.
A cold-set confection rather than a cooked one: the flowers are glued with gum mucilage and built up in layers of sugar until they set hard. Everything hinges on the mucilage being thin enough to coat without drowning the petals.
- Gum tragacanthStill sold under that name to bakers and sugarcraft suppliers; "gum-dragon" is an old English corruption of tragacanth. It swells slowly, so start with a scant teaspoon of powder in half a cup of cold water and leave it overnight. The result should be the consistency of thin egg white, not a gel.
- Loaf sugar, powderedLoaf sugar was hard refined sugar broken from a cone and crushed at home. Use ordinary granulated sugar ground fine in a spice mill or blender, or caster sugar. Modern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch and gives a chalky, dull finish.
- A warm placeIn a Victorian kitchen this would have meant somewhere like a plate rack or the top of the range, though the recipe does not say. Something in the region of 90-110F with a little air movement works in practice: an oven with only the pilot or the light on, or a dehydrator on its lowest setting. Much hotter and the petals are likely to brown and lose their scent.
- TimingThe original gives none because it depends entirely on humidity. Expect several hours to a full day, sprinkling more sugar every hour or so as the surface goes from tacky to dry, until the flowers are opaque and rigid.
- The flowers themselvesUse the small flowers, picked dry and stripped from the stem with the green calyx removed; they are usually pale blue-lilac, though white and pink forms exist. They are fragile and unlikely to survive washing, so they should come from a plant you know has not been sprayed.
- Storage"Cool dry place" is the operative instruction; candied flowers reabsorb moisture readily and will go sticky in a matter of days in a humid kitchen. An airtight tin with a little extra powdered sugar keeps them for months.
- Yield and useUse -- they are a garnish for iced cakes, custards and sweet wines rather than something eaten by the spoonful.
Candying flowers with gum and sugar is one of the oldest surviving techniques in English confectionery, running from the sixteenth-century banqueting-house "conceits" of violets, borage and rose petals through to the crystallised violets still sold in Toulouse. Gum tragacanth, tapped from Middle Eastern Astragalus shrubs, was the standard binder for sugar paste and gum paste work long before gelatine became a kitchen staple, and it does two jobs here: it holds the sugar to the petal and stiffens the flower so it keeps its shape. Rosemary in particular carried a heavy freight of meaning as the herb of remembrance and fidelity, and in herbal tradition it was long credited with strengthening the memory and the brain, so candied rosemary flowers were valued as much as a mild medicine and a symbolic gift as a sweetmeat. That the method was still being recorded in the late nineteenth century says something about how conservative the confectioner's craft was; the entry would not have looked out of place two hundred years earlier.