Home › The Principles of Cookery › Strawberry Glaces
Strawberry Glaces
Take a spongecake two or three days old, and cut it into squares, rounds, and diamonds. Boil a pound of sugar with a pint of water to a clear syrup. Boil and skim this, and keep trying whether it is done enough by dropping a small portion of it at a time into a basin of cold water placed by the side of the stove for the purpose. If the sugar snaps when dropped into the water, and then remains hard, it is ready for the strawberry-juice, which should be added in such a quantity as to bring the syrup to 38deg. Take the syrup from the fire, let it cool, and beat it with a wooden spoon till it is quite smooth. Stick the pieces of sponge biscuit one by one on the point of a skewer, dip them into the icing, and place them on a sieve to drain. When all are done, put them in a cool oven for a minute or two to dry. Let them cool and they will be ready for use.
A Victorian petit-four: stale sponge cut into shapes and dipped in a strawberry-tinted sugar glaze. The only genuinely puzzling instruction is the "38deg", which is a confectioner's density reading, not an oven or room temperature.
- What "38deg" meansAlmost certainly a density reading taken with a confectioner's saccharometer; on the Baume scale, which such instruments commonly used, 38 degrees is a fairly heavy syrup of roughly 1.35 specific gravity. Adding strawberry juice thins the boiled sugar back down to that density; without a hydrometer, add juice until the syrup coats a spoon thickly but still flows freely, then beat it pale and smooth.
- The hard-crack testSugar that snaps in cold water and stays brittle is hard crack, about 300-310F. The syrup is deliberately taken past the point it needs to be, then let down again with fruit juice, which is what gives the glaze its gloss and its set.
- Beat it as it coolsThe hinge of the recipe. Working the cooled syrup with a wooden spoon crystallises it very finely, turning a clear syrup into an opaque, pourable fondant-style icing. Beat it too hot and the crystals come coarse and grainy; leave it until cold and hard and it seizes into a paste you cannot dip with.
- Strawberry juiceCrush ripe berries and strain through muslin; do not use a thick puree, which will dull the glaze and make it grainy. Expect a pale pink rather than a strong colour.
- Stale sponge is not a faultTwo or three days of drying is what lets the cake cut cleanly into squares, rounds and diamonds and stops it disintegrating on the skewer. Fresh sponge tears and soaks up the icing.
- A cool ovenNo temperature is given; a very low modern oven, somewhere in the region of 200-250F, and only long enough to set the surface, a couple of minutes. The point is to dry the glaze to a firm shell, not to bake the cake again.
- Quantities and yieldA pound of sugar to a pint of water gives more icing than a single sponge cake is likely to need, so halve it unless you are working at Victorian scale. Dip over the bowl of icing and let the excess run back.
- Draining and dryingA wire rack does the work of the sieve, with a tray beneath to catch drips. Set the pieces well apart so the glaze does not weld them together as it sets.
Glaces of this sort belong to the French-influenced confectionery that filled the sweet course and the tea table in later Victorian England. The instruction to read the syrup at 38 degrees suggests a writer used to the confectioner's saccharometer, which judged syrups by density on a scale running from thin sugar solutions up to the heavy syrups used for icings and preserves; the domestic cook, lacking one, could fall back on the cold-water test the recipe also describes. Using up sponge cake a few days past its best is the frugal heart of the thing, and it explains why the recipe assumes such a cake will be to hand: stale sponge could become trifle, pudding bases, or, dressed in a bright fruit glaze, something fit to hand round again.