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Wintergreen Wafers
1 oz. gum tragacanth Confectioners' sugar 1 cup cold water Oil of wintergreen Soak gum tragacanth in water twenty-four hours and rub through a fine wire sieve; add enough confectioners' sugar to knead. Flavor with a few drops of oil of winter-green. If liked pink, color with fruit red. Roll until very thin on a board or marble dredged with sugar. Shape with a small round cutter or cut in three-fourths inch squares. Spread wafers, cover, and let stand until dry and brittle. This mixture may be flavored with oil of lemon, clove, sassafras, etc., and colored as desired.
This is a gum-paste confection — pastillage — of the sort a 1900s cook made at home for after-dinner mints. The paste itself is simply gum and sugar, but the two flavourings named are the problem, and they are the reason this page should be read rather than followed.
- Oil of wintergreen is not a kitchen flavouringOil of wintergreen is methyl salicylate, a concentrated salicylate closely related to aspirin. The undiluted oil sold today is a topical and industrial product, and ingested doses measured in a single teaspoon have proved fatal, particularly to children. "A few drops" dripped into a batch of uncounted candies gives no control over how much lands in any one wafer.
- The suggested sassafras is bannedOil of sassafras is high in safrole, which the U.S. banned as a food additive in 1960 after it was shown to cause liver tumours in animals. Root beer and sassafras candies are now made with safrole-free extract. The clove and lemon oils listed alongside it are ordinary flavour oils, but the list as printed cannot be worked through as written.
- "Fruit red"A period term for liquid red food colouring sold for fruit and confectionery work. The dyes behind that name were unregulated and several of the coal-tar reds then in use have since been delisted.
- Gum tragacanthA plant exudate from Astragalus shrubs, still sold to cake decorators, though gum tragacanth has largely been displaced by tylose (CMC) powder for gum paste. One ounce to a cup of water makes a very stiff mucilage, which is why the recipe calls for a full day of soaking and then forcing it through a sieve to break up the lumps.
- The marble slabThe dredging -- The recipe gives a board or marble as alternatives, and calls for the surface to be dredged with sugar rather than flour.
- "Until dry and brittle"Air-dried gum paste wafers take a day or two at room temperature under the cover the recipe calls for. They keep well once hard, which is what made them a store-cupboard sweet rather than a same-day one.
- If you want to make theseUse a current gum-paste or pastille recipe with a food-grade flavouring extract and food colouring sold for the purpose.