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Candies and Candy Making: Drops
Candy Drops.-In addition to the regular pastils, the following recipes for candy drops are recommended: Orange Drops. - Extract and strain the juice of 1 orange, grate up the rind, stir in a pinch of tartaric acid and thicken with confectioners' sugar to a stiff paste; roll into balls the size of marbles. These may be coated with chocolate if desired.
Acid Drops. - To 8 ounces of pounded and sifted sugar add 2½ ounces of water. Place in pastil sugar boiler and proceed as for pastil drops. When ready to remove from the fire stir in ¼ ounce of tartaric acid. As soon as this is stirred in form into drops as for pastils.
Cinnamon Drops. -Four drops of oil of cinnamon, ounce of water, 3¼ ounces of sifted sugar. Add a few drops of prepared cochineal to color rose pink. - Coffee Pastils. - Extract the strength of 1 ounce of coffee by boiling down in pint of water for 6 minutes, strain and use ounce of this liquid to 3¼ ounces of sugar.
Cocoanut Drops.-Beat up 1 pound of fresh grated cocoanut and pound of white sugar with the whites of 6 or more eggs to a stiff froth. There must be sufficient white of egg to moisten the whole. Drop on buttered plates in pieces the size of macaroons.
Currant and Raspberry Paste Drops. Use 1 pound of currants or raspberries, or equal parts of each, boil and sift the pulp. Add an equal bulk of coarse sifted sugar. Boil down until it will harden in water.
Drop on clean tin from a pastil sugar boiler in wafers the size of macaroons. Let sand for 2 hours to dry, and wrap up each piece in waxed paper, or pack between layers of paper and keep in a dry place.
Ginger Drops.-Pound and sift Chineşe ginger and stir in ounce of water in quantity according to taste.
To this add 3¼ ounces of sifted sugar and make into pastils.
Lemon Cream Drops. - Extract and strain the juice of 1 lemon and grate the rind. Stir in a pinch of tartaric acid, thicken with confectioners' sugar to a stiff paste, and form into balls as large as marbles.
A group of small sugar confections built on one method: a hot sugar syrup or a stiff sugar paste, flavoured and dropped in coins onto a cold surface. The uncooked orange and lemon drops need no equipment at all; the boiled ones want a thermometer.
- The pastil method these refer back to"Proceed as for pastil drops" means dissolving the sugar in the small quantity of water and boiling the syrup before dropping it in small rounds from the lip of the pan onto oiled marble or a silicone mat. The book gives no temperature; for drops that set glassy rather than chewy you are working somewhere near the hard-crack stage. The small water quantities are consistent with this: it is a syrup, not a solution to be reduced at length.
- Pastil sugar boilerA small, deep, long-handled copper pan with a pouring lip, used for depositing drops one at a time. A heavy stainless butter-melting pan works, or pour the syrup into a metal squeeze bottle or funnel with a stopper rod.
- Tartaric acidStill sold as a baking and winemaking ingredient. In the acid drops it is stirred in as the pan comes off the fire because acid held in boiling syrup inverts the sugar and the drops stay sticky rather than setting glassy. In the uncooked orange and lemon pastes it is simply sourness.
- Oil of cinnamonBuy a food-grade cinnamon flavouring oil, not an oil sold for aromatherapy or other non-food use. Four drops to a few ounces of sugar is the right order of magnitude; undiluted cinnamon oil is a mucous-membrane irritant and more is not better.
- CochinealCarmine, the red colouring made from cochineal insects, still sold as a natural food colour and listed as carmine or E120. Any red food colouring gives the same rose pink. It is not vegetarian.
- Coconut drops need an ovenCoconut drops -- The instruction stops at dropping them onto buttered plates, but a raw egg-white-and-coconut mixture will not keep and leaves the whites uncooked. Period cocoanut drops of this type were generally dried out in a slow oven like macaroons; bake until dry and just coloured. Use fresh grated coconut or unsweetened desiccated coconut; sweetened bagged flake will make them cloying.
- Fruit paste drops"Boil down until it will harden in water" is the cold-water test, somewhere around the firm-ball stage. Currants are high in pectin and acid and set the paste briskly; raspberries much less so, which is why the two are often combined. Stir constantly at the end, as it scorches easily.
- Chinese gingerHere evidently a dried ginger root, since it is pounded and sifted to a powder (the same term was also used of preserved Canton ginger). Ground ginger from a jar does the same job; it will not dissolve, so the drops come out slightly cloudy.
- Yield and keepingKeeping -- Boiled sugar drops pick up moisture from the air and go tacky within a day or two unless stored airtight with a desiccant; the fruit pastes keep better, wrapped as directed.
"Pastil" is the older spelling of pastille, and in a confectioner's vocabulary of the period it meant a small flat lozenge of boiled sugar dropped from the lip of a pan rather than cut or moulded. Household encyclopaedias like this one printed such recipes at a time when commercial sweets were still bought loose by weight from a confectioner. The list also shows how thoroughly the confectioner's shelf overlapped with the chemist's: tartaric acid, oil of cinnamon and prepared cochineal were bought at the druggist, and lozenges of this kind sat on the boundary between sweet and medicine, sold as throat drops as well as candy. The two fruit-juice recipes at either end of the list, orange and lemon, are the odd ones out, being uncooked fondant-style pastes stiffened with confectioners' sugar and needing nothing but a bowl.