Home › Candies and Candy Making › Candies and Candy Making: Beat
Candies and Candy Making: Beat
Remove and set the saucepan in a pan of cold water. Beat up with an egg beater until it creams. Mold into balls with the hands, and arrange in layers with figs, dates, or nuts between, and cut into squares. Or mold into any desired shape and place the nuts on top. This is suitable fondant for chocolate creams.
French Cream, with Glucose. - Pour over 2 tablespoonfuls of glucose cupful of boiling water. Stir in Confectioners' XXX sugar to make a stiff paste. After standing half an hour knead thoroughly with the hands. Color and flavor to taste.
French Vanilla Cream. - Take the whites of any desired number of eggs and an equal quantity of cold water or milk. Stir in Confectioners' XXX sugar to make a stiff paste, tint and flavor to taste. Form in fancy shapes and place on waxed paper to dry. This is suitable fondant for all bonbons and chocolate drops.
About 1½ pounds of confectioners' sugar will be required for the white of 1 egg.
Cream Candy. - Boil together to the hard snap 1 pound of white sugar, 1 cupful of water, ½ teaspoonful of cream of tartar, 2 teaspoonfuls of best white vinegar, 2 teaspoonfuls of vanilla, butter the size of an egg.
When it hardens on being dropped in water pour into a buttered pan and when nearly cold pull.
Or boil to the hard snap, or about half an hour over a slow fire, 3 pounds of loaf sugar, pint of water, add 1 teaspoonful of fine pickled gum arabic dissolved in 2 tablespoonfuls of boiling water and 1 tablespoonful of vinegar. Boil until it hardens on being dropped in water, remove and flavor as desired. Rub the hands with unsalted butter and pull until the candy is white. Twist or break it, stretch into ribbons, cut to any desired size, and lay on buttered plates or waxed paper to harden.
This is a run of four related confections — two uncooked fondants and two pulled hard candies — printed as continuous text with no headings, so read carefully to see where one ends and the next begins. One of them, the French Vanilla Cream, is built on raw egg white that is never heated at any point.
- The raw-egg fondantFrench Vanilla Cream binds roughly 1½ lb of confectioners' sugar per raw egg white and is then simply dried on waxed paper. Nothing in the process reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and sugar alone does not make the mixture safe — the water activity of a soft fondant is well within the range where surviving bacteria persist. Use a current recipe built on pasteurised egg white or meringue powder instead.
- "Hard snap"The old confectioner's term for what is now called the hard crack stage: 300–310°F. The cold-water test described here is the period method, but a candy thermometer removes the guesswork. The "about half an hour over a slow fire" in the second cream candy is a rough guide only and depends entirely on your pan.
- GlucoseCommercial glucose syrup, a confectioner's staple of the period. Light corn syrup is the closest modern substitute, tablespoon for tablespoon. It is there as an interfering agent, to keep the sugar from crystallising into a grainy mass.
- Confectioners' XXX sugarAn older grading, generally coarser than the 10X powdered sugar on supermarket shelves today. Because the grind differs, the amount of sugar needed to reach a stiff paste may not match exactly; add it gradually rather than all at once.
- Loaf sugarRefined white sugar sold in a hard cone and broken up with nippers — it was simply the purest sugar available. Ordinary granulated sugar is the equivalent.
- Butter the size of an eggUsually reckoned at about 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons.
- Gum arabic"Fine pickled gum arabic" is almost certainly "picked" gum arabic — hand-sorted clear lumps, the top grade. Powdered gum arabic sold for baking works; dissolve it fully before adding, or it will leave gritty specks through the pull.
- PullingWork the candy at the point where it is cool enough to handle but still plastic, and keep going until it turns opaque and satiny — that whiteness is aerated structure, not a colour change. Buttered hands, not floured; salt in the butter will pit the surface.
- The hingeOnce the syrup boils, stop stirring and wash any sugar crystals off the pan sides with a wet brush. A single stray crystal will seed the whole batch and turn a clear pull into sandy candy — which is exactly what the cream of tartar, vinegar and glucose in these formulas are there to prevent.
Fondant — sugar taken to the soft-ball stage, cooled undisturbed, then beaten until it turns opaque and creamy — reached American home cooks from French confectionery practice in the second half of the nineteenth century, and "French cream" became common shorthand for a pliable white sugar paste used as a bonbon centre. What is striking in this page is the appearance of shortcuts: two of the four formulas skip boiling entirely, building the paste from confectioners' sugar with glucose or egg white as the binder. Both depend on industrial products that had become widely available to domestic kitchens by around 1900 — cheap machine-milled powdered sugar and commercial glucose syrup, the latter manufactured from cornstarch by American refiners in that era. Household manuals of the period, this one among them, were quick to pass such conveniences along, and home candy-making was popular in the decades either side of 1900.