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Sugar, Small Ornaments Of
Soak a little gum tragacanth in water. Make it into a paste by mixing double refined powdered sugar upon it. Colour this with cochineal, spinach-juice, yolk of egg, chocolate, or indigo, etc., to give it the desired tinge, and mould it to any shape. Pretty ornaments may be thus made for cakes and sweet dishes.
This is gum paste — what confectioners now call pastillage or flower paste — reduced to its two essential components. The instructions assume you already know how sugar work behaves, so the working details are worth spelling out.
- The hinge: hydrate the gum first, aloneGum tragacanth needs several hours in cold water before it will do anything useful; a scant teaspoon of the powder to two tablespoons of water, left covered overnight, gives a clear mucilage. Sugar added to under-soaked gum produces gritty paste that cracks as it dries.
- Gum tragacanth todayStill sold as a powder by cake-decorating suppliers and in Middle Eastern groceries (katira). Tylose powder or CMC is the modern substitute and behaves the same way, though it hydrates in minutes rather than hours.
- "Double refined powdered sugar"Icing or confectioners' sugar. The Victorian cook ground and sifted loaf sugar herself; modern icing sugar already contains a little anti-caking starch, which is harmless here.
- Proportions, since none are givenWork in the sugar a spoonful at a time until the mass stops taking any more and feels like firm modelling clay — roughly 8-10 oz sugar to the quantity of mucilage above. Knead on a sugar-dusted board, not a floured one.
- Omit the indigoThe indigo on a 19th-century household shelf was most often laundry blueing, a textile product of uncertain purity rather than anything sold for eating. Use a modern blue food colouring instead. Cochineal survives as carmine and is genuinely edible.
- The other colouringsSpinach juice (blanched leaves pounded and pressed) gives a soft green that browns as it dries; egg yolk gives yellow but adds raw egg to something that is never cooked, so use a paste colour if the ornaments are for children or will sit out. Cocoa or melted chocolate works for brown but softens the paste, so compensate with extra sugar.
- DryingModelled pieces need 12-24 hours uncovered in a dry room to set hard; keep the unused paste tightly wrapped and airtight or it skins over in minutes. Finished ornaments last for months in a dry box and are meant to be decorative more than delicious.
Gum paste sits at the bottom of a long ladder of Victorian sugar work whose top rungs were spun sugar baskets, blown sugar fruit and architectural pastillage centrepieces of the kind Carême had made fashionable earlier in the century. What Cassell's records is less a recipe than a technique — the same paste, coloured differently and cut with tin shapes, served for cake flowers, sweetmeat cases and the little tokens set around a dessert. Gum tragacanth, the dried sap of Middle Eastern Astragalus shrubs, reached British kitchens through the drug trade and appears in chemists' catalogues alongside its use as a pill binder and fabric dressing; it survives in the food code as E413. The list of colourings is a fair portrait of what a household could reach for before synthetic food dyes were regulated, indigo among them.