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Wintergreen Creams
Wintergreen Creams are made by boiling two cups of sugar, two thirds of a cup of water. When boiling rapidly, put in one-eighth teaspoon of cream of tartar. When the syrup strings, take from fire, add one teaspoon of Larkin Wintergreen Flavoring Extract and beat until it begins to grain, Drop quickly on waxed or buttered paper.
This is a small-batch fondant patty, and everything depends on reading the syrup correctly. Once it starts to grain in the pan you have less than a minute to work.
- "When the syrup strings"A visual cue, not a temperature; the book gives none. It falls somewhere in the thread-to-soft-ball range, roughly 230-240F on a candy thermometer. A thread of syrup dropped from the spoon should spin out and hold rather than fall in beads.
- Cream of tartarAn eighth of a teaspoon is not a flavoring. The acid inverts part of the sucrose so the candy sets in fine crystals instead of gritty ones. Do not leave it out, and do not double it or the batch may refuse to grain at all.
- Beat at the right momentModern practice is to let the syrup cool substantially and undisturbed before beating, rather than beating it straight off the heat. Stirring a very hot syrup encourages coarse crystals.
- Drop quicklyThis is the hinge. The mass goes from pourable to crumbly in seconds. Have the waxed paper laid out before you start, and use two spoons. If it stiffens in the pan, set it over the barest heat and stir until it loosens.
- Larkin Wintergreen Flavoring ExtractA house-brand alcohol-based extract, long discontinued. Any commercial wintergreen extract works at the same measure. Pure oil of wintergreen is a different product entirely, far stronger and toxic in teaspoon quantities; if you have only the oil, a drop or two is the whole allowance.
- Pan and volumeUse a heavy saucepan at least three times the depth of the syrup. Two cups of sugar boils up higher than beginners expect, and a scorched patch will tint the whole white batch.
- YieldRoughly a pound of candy, dropped as small patties. They firm up in an hour and keep a week in a tin between layers of waxed paper.
- HumidityFondant is unforgiving on a wet day. Sugar draws water from the air and the patties stay tacky, so choose dry weather if you can.
Wintergreen was one of the standard American confectioners' flavors of the nineteenth century, alongside peppermint and sassafras; the name usually refers to Gaultheria procumbens, also called checkerberry, the low creeping shrub whose leaves and berries yield methyl salicylate. Patties like these are simply hand-made fondant, the same white sugar cream that filled commercial chocolates. The specific call for a branded extract marks the recipe as belonging to the era when household cookbooks and pamphlets were often issued by grocery and mail-order firms, with the company's own bottles named in the ingredient lists; the Larkin Company of Buffalo, a soap and household-goods concern that distributed goods through neighborhood clubs, printed recipe collections of exactly this kind.