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Candies and Candy Making: Creams
Maple Creams.-Beat up together with an egg beater or otherwise the white of 1 egg and 1 cup of pure maple sirup. Stir in Confectioners' XXX sugar to make a stiff paste, mold to any desired shape, and coat with chocolate or fondant.
Or boil to the soft-ball state 1 pound of maple sugar with teaspoonful of cream of tartar and cup of water. Let stand in the saucepan until nearly cold, and stir until it clouds or becomes creamy.
Pour into a shallow tin greased with oil of sweet almonds or unsalted butter to cool. When cold cut to any desired shape.
Or mix grated maple sugar with French cream, and stir in dry confectioners' sugar to make a stiff paste. a Peppermint Creams.
Flavor French cream freely with essence of peppermint and shape into round, flat creams - Wintergreen Creams, Flavor French cream freely with wintergreen essence and color pink. Shape into round, flat forms or mold as desired. - Neapolitan Creams.
Divide French cream into a number of parts.
Tint and flavor these differently, and arrange on waxed paper or a marble slab in the same fashion as layer cake or marble cake. Roll out the mass with a rolling pin or by pressure with the hand to any desired thickness, and the parts will be found to keep their relative positions. Cut to any desired shape.
FRUIT AND NUT CREAMS Fruit Creams. -Chop up any desired fruit as citron, currants, figs, or seedless raisins very fine and mix with French cream while the sugar is being stirred in. Roll the mass on a suitable slab with a rolling pin, and cut or mold to any desired shape.
Fig Creams. - Quarter small figs with a sharp knife so as to leave the quarters connected at the stem. Color and flavor French cream or fondant as desired, roll flat, cut into strips of the thickness of the little finger, cut off pieces somewhat shorter than the fig and place one in each fig, closing the quarters about it.
Dip the whole in French cream or fondant.
Or cut dry figs in strips and wrap the inner seed side around a piece of fondant. Cut to any desired shape.
Chop any desired nut or mixture of nuts very fine, and stir with the sugar into French cream. Mold to fancy shapes and tint or flavor as desired.
Date Creams. - Remove the pits from the dates, split open the end, insert a ball of cream with a clove stuck in the end.
Almond Creams. - Chop the almonds fine and stir with the sugar into French cream, or mold the French cream to fancy shapes and press the almond meat into the side.
A cluster of variations built on one base, the book's "French cream" (an uncooked fondant of sugar, egg white and flavouring worked stiff by hand). Nothing here needs a thermometer except the boiled maple version, but a few of the materials have changed names.
- French cream and fondantBoth are cross-references to earlier entries in the candy section rather than things to improvise. If you are substituting, a standard cooked fondant behaves the same way under a rolling pin and keeps better than the uncooked kind.
- Raw egg whiteThe first maple cream and the book's French cream are never heated. Use pasteurized liquid egg white or reconstituted meringue powder, which handle identically, and keep the finished sweets refrigerated rather than in a tin on a shelf.
- Confectioners' XXX sugarAn old grading scale: XXX was a coarser powdered sugar than today's 10X. Modern powdered sugar is finer and contains cornstarch, so the quantity needed to reach a stiff paste may differ. Add it in stages.
- Soft-ball state235-240F on a candy thermometer. Maple sugar scorches more readily than cane, so keep the heat moderate and do not scrape the pan sides in.
- The hinge: let it cool before stirring"Let stand in the saucepan until nearly cold" is the whole trick. Stirring hot maple syrup gives coarse, gritty crystals; stirring it cool, until it clouds, gives the fine grain that makes a cream. Once it clouds, work quickly, as it firms up fast.
- Oil of sweet almondsA bland, near-flavourless food-grade oil once sold by every druggist, used here only to keep the candy from sticking. Any neutral oil does the job. It is not the same thing as bitter almond oil or almond extract.
- Maple sugarSolid maple sugar is still made but sold mainly at maple producers and specialty shops. "Grated" means shaved from a hard cake; granulated maple sugar can be substituted, measuring by weight where possible.
- Yield and storageLayer the finished creams between waxed paper; the fruit and nut versions are best eaten within a week, as the chopped fruit and the fondant exchange moisture.
Hand-worked cream centres like these were a mainstay of American home confectionery in the decades around 1900, when cheap refined sugar and mass-produced "confectioners'" grades put candy making within reach of many kitchens. The point of a book like this was that a single base paste, tinted and flavoured, could be turned into a whole boxed assortment: peppermints, wintergreen pinks, layered Neapolitans and stuffed figs and dates, all from one bowl. Wintergreen and peppermint essences were druggist goods, and cochineal was among the colourings available for pink. The maple variants reflect a Northeastern habit of treating maple sugar as a flavouring in its own right rather than merely a sweetener, and stuffed dates and figs were a familiar sweet of the period.