Home › More Recipes › Candied Mint Leaves
Candied Mint Leaves
Wipe Fresh mint leaves, remove from stems and rub each leaf gently with the finger dipped in Egg white slightly beaten. Mix 3 tablespoons granulated sugar with 3 drops oil of spearmint, and sift over each side of the mint leaves. Lay close together on a cake rack covered with wax paper and leave in a warm but not a hot place until crisp and dry. Serve in Tea with Sliced lemon and Loaf sugar.
TEA Half fill a perforated tea spoon or tea ball with Orange Pekoe, or other preferred tea. Place in cup, add fresh Boiling water, until cup is two-thirds full. Remove tea spoon as soon as tea is of the desired strength. Two or three cups of tea can usually be made without emptying and refilling the tea spoon.
This is a garnish rather than a dish, and the method is the standard pre-war one for crystallizing leaves and petals: raw egg white as glue, sugar as shell, air as the only drying agent. That combination is the reason it should not be reproduced as printed.
- Raw egg white is never cookedThe leaves are coated in beaten egg white and then left to dry in a warm place — conditions that never reach a temperature lethal to Salmonella, and that hold the coating for hours in the range where bacteria multiply fastest. The sugar shell does not sterilize anything, and the leaves are eaten as they are. If you want candied mint, use a current recipe built around pasteurized egg white or powdered albumen.
- "A warm but not a hot place"The back of the range, a plate warmer, or the shelf above the stove: the gentle residual heat of a coal or gas range in constant use. It assumes a heat source that is always on, and is awkward to reproduce on a modern oven's lowest setting.
- Oil of spearmintSold at the druggist rather than the grocer, and far stronger than modern culinary extracts: three drops is a genuine dose for three tablespoons of sugar. Present-day food-grade spearmint oils vary widely in concentration, so the ratio in the original is not transferable.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar was sold as a hard cone or block and broken up with sugar nippers; the "loaf sugar" served with the tea here is the lump sugar that later came pressed into cubes. The granulated sugar used for the coating is simply a different form, which is why the recipe names it separately.
- Tea spoon and tea ballA "perforated tea spoon" is a hinged mesh spoon that clamps shut over loose leaf, not a measuring spoon; the recipe treats it and the tea ball as interchangeable. Half-filling it and pulling it out early is sound advice for Orange Pekoe, which turns bitter with long steeping.
- Reusing the leafTwo or three cups drawn from one filling will each be markedly weaker than the last.
Crystallized leaves and flowers — mint, violets, rose petals, borage — belonged to the confectioner's craft long before they reached books of home entertaining, and were used through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to decorate cold sweets, cakes and drinks. Serving tea with lemon and without milk was associated with tea "in the Russian manner", a style known in American entertaining of the period; the mint leaf here does the work of garnish and sweetener at once.