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Candies and Candy Making: Grate
To Flavor Orange. - Grate the rind of 1 or more oranges on a suitable quantity of lump sugar and place the whole in a tightly stoppered bottle until the sugar has been thoroughly impregnated and the rind dries and can be readily scraped off.
Remove the rind and preserve the sugar for future use.
To Prepare Lemon Sugar. Grate the rind of 1 or more lemons and prepare in the same manner as orange sugar.
Cinnamon Sugar. - Dry ounce of cinnamon and pulverize with pound of loaf sugar by grinding in a mortar or with a suitable piece of hard wood. Cork tightly and preserve for use.
Clove Sugar. - Pulverize 1 ounce of cloves to pound of loaf sugar and preserve in the same manner as cinnamon sugar.
Ginger Sugar. -Preserve ounce of pulverized ginger in the manner described above for cinnamon sugar.
Vanilla Sugar. -Pulverize 4 sticks of vanilla with pound of loaf sugar and preserve for use.
ICES AND ICING Icings for Candy and Cake.
A set of flavored sugars made by holding aromatics against sugar in a sealed jar. The method still works exactly as written; only the sugar itself needs translating.
- Loaf and lump sugarBoth mean hard cone or cube sugar, which was broken up as needed. Sugar cubes work for the citrus method; for the spice sugars, use ordinary granulated and grind it finer as you go.
- Quantities in the spice sugarsSome figures have dropped out of this printing: the cinnamon and ginger weights and the sugar quantities (the clove line still reads 1 ounce of cloves to a pound of sugar, and the vanilla line 4 sticks). A workable ratio is 1 ounce of ground spice to 1 pound of sugar for cinnamon, rather less for clove if you want it usable; treat the printed lines as a proportion, not a measurement.
- Vanilla sticksFour whole vanilla beans to a pound of sugar is generous by modern prices. Two split beans buried in a pound of sugar for two weeks give a strong result, and the beans can be reused.
- GrindingA mortar or a spice mill both work. Sugar ground fine with spice will cake, so sift before use and store in a tightly closed jar out of the light.
- Drying the cinnamon"Dry" the cinnamon most likely means warming it briefly to drive off moisture so it powders cleanly rather than gumming the mortar. The book specifies no method or temperature; a short spell in a very low oven will serve.
- Keeping and yieldFlavored sugar keeps well in a tightly sealed jar, though the aroma fades with time. Citrus sugars will fade fastest as the volatile oils dissipate, so make them in small batches.
Flavored sugars belong to a long stretch of confectionery practice in which sugar was both the sweetener and the carrier of aroma, well before commercial extracts were cheap or reliable. The rubbing of a sugar lump on citrus peel, now often called the oleo-saccharum method though the name is a later one, is well attested in punch and cordial practice from the eighteenth century onward and survives in bartending today. Household manuals of the 1900s, of which this is one, printed such preparations under candy making because a confectioner's pantry was expected to hold its own flavorings; a home cook who wanted orange in a fondant or a cake icing made orange sugar in advance rather than buying a bottle of oil of orange. The spice sugars follow the same logic, and the assumption that sugar arrives as a hard loaf to be broken and pounded tells you the period as clearly as anything else on the page.