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Peppermints
1 1/2 cups sugar 1/2 cup boiling water 6 drops oil peppermint Put sugar and water into a granite saucepan and stir until sugar is dissolved. Boil ten minutes; remove from fire, add peppermint, and beat until of right consistency. Drop from tip of spoon on slightly buttered paper.
A two-ingredient fondant patty, and everything depends on reading the syrup correctly. The ten-minute boil is a rough proxy for a temperature you can now simply measure.
- The hinge: syrup stageTen minutes of boiling is meant to bring the syrup to the soft-ball stage, roughly 236-240F. Timing alone varies with pan width and burner output, so use a thermometer; undercooked syrup never sets and overcooked syrup turns to gravel while you beat it.
- Granite saucepan"Granite" means graniteware, enamelled steel with a speckled finish, chosen because it did not react with sugar or discolour the candy. Any heavy-bottomed stainless or enamelled pan works.
- Do not stir after boiling startsThe instruction to stir applies only until the sugar dissolves. Stirring a boiling sugar syrup seeds crystals and the finished mints go coarse. Wash stray crystals down from the pan sides with a wet brush instead.
- Oil of peppermintThis is the concentrated essential oil, not the alcohol-based peppermint extract sold for baking. Six drops of oil is potent; if substituting extract you need considerably more, and the alcohol can thin the syrup.
- Beating to "right consistency"The recipe has you beat it straight off the fire. Beat until it loses its gloss and thickens enough to drop from the spoon and hold its shape. It goes from fluid to unworkable quickly, so have the paper ready before you start.
- The paper"Buttered paper" would have been ordinary smooth paper, lightly greased. Modern parchment or a silicone mat needs no butter at all.
- Yield and settingRoughly three to four dozen small patties, depending on how large you drop them. Leave them at room temperature an hour or two until firm and dry to the touch; kept in a tin between layers of paper they hold for several days.
Peppermint patties of this kind were among the simplest sweets a home cook could turn out, needing only sugar, water and a bottle of oil of peppermint from the druggist. Uncooked fondant, boiled fondant, and drop mints are all the same craft of controlling how sugar recrystallises, and a cook who could beat a syrup to the right point could frost a cake or make candy with the same skill. Oil of peppermint was a standard pharmacy item in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sold as a digestive and carminative as much as a flavouring, which may be part of why the after-dinner mint acquired its reputation as an aid to digestion.