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Candies and Candy Making: Knead
Knead to a stiff paste with the aid of a little rose water, and form into drops or lozenges. The refined extract of licorice comes in solid form and after being dried for a few days in a warm place can be easily reduced to powder and mixed with the other ingredients.
Ginger Lozenges. -Place ounce of gum arabic in an earthenware bowl, pour over it 1 gill of hot water, and let stand to cool. Stir to a stiff paste with Confectioners' XXX sugar, of which about 14 ounces will be required, and flavor with spoonful of powdered ginger. Knead to a stiff paste, roll out, and cut or mold to any desired form.
Sweet Almond Lozenges. Knead together to a stiff paste 1½ pounds of Confectioners' XXX sugar, pound of wheat or cornstarch, 1 pound of powdered blanched almonds. Flavor with essence of orange or lemon if desired.
COUGH CANDIES Hoarhound Candy. -Boil the hoarhound in a little water until the juice is extracted, and strain through cheese cloth. Boil any desired quantity of sugar with just enough water to dissolve it and stir in the juice.
Work the sugar with a spoon against the sides of the pan until it grows thick and creamy. Pour out in a buttered pan. When nearly cold mark into squares and let dry.
Or boil the sugar until candied and stir in dry and powdered hoarhound. Pour out in buttered tins to cool.
Pine-tree Tar Cough Candy.-To 10 pounds of granulated sugar add 3 pints of water. Boil to the hard snap, pour out and while cooling spread on top 10 drops of tar (made by dissolving 1 tablespoonful of tar in 2 tablespoonfuls of alcohol), 1 tablespoonful of oil of capsicum, 1½ tablespoonfuls of oil of wintergreen. Work together with the hands or a wooden paddle until these substances are thoroughly worked in, keeping the mass warm before the fire, or by means of a soapstone. Roll into round sticks and keep rolling until cold.
TO COLOR AND FLAVOR CANDY Colorings for Candy.
Coloring matter for candies can be purchased in small jars for a few cents each.
These are so intense that a drop will CANDIES AND CANDY MAKING tint a pound of candy. Hence they will last a long time. Red, yellow, orange, light green, violet, maraschino, constitute a good assortment. Some knowledge of color is necessary to a tasteful effect. White cream may, of course, be coated with any other color, but colored cream should be coated only with tints or shades of the same color. Otherwise the center will show through and produce an unsatisfactory effect. The center should usually be of a lighter tint than the coating. A good rule when coating bonbons is, after having formed the centers, to set the fondant away for twenty-four hours.
Then melt it with a little added coloring matter to give a deeper shade and coat the centers in this.
Thus maple cream may be coated with maple fondant, chocolate cream with chocolate fondant, and the like.
A run of pressed lozenges and old-style cough candies from the confectionery chapter, printed with the loose measurements typical of the period — several quantities have dropped out of the text entirely. One of the recipes on this page should not be made at all.
- Pine-tree tar candy is not a food recipeThe tar called for is wood or pine tar (pix liquida), a pharmacy article of the period rather than a food ingredient. Wood tar contains polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and is not approved as a food ingredient in the United States, though food-grade wood tar is still used in some Nordic sweets; this recipe also carries the tar in alcohol and adds oil of capsicum at tablespoon scale. Use a current cough-drop recipe or a commercial product instead.
- Missing quantitiesThe typesetting has lost several numbers: "ounce of gum arabic" and "pound of wheat or cornstarch" are almost certainly fractions, and "spoonful of powdered ginger" gives no size. Treat the ginger lozenges as roughly 1 oz gum arabic to 14 oz sugar and adjust the powder to taste rather than trusting the printed text.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fluid ounces. Poured hot over gum arabic and left to stand, it makes the mucilage that binds the lozenge paste; the gum needs several hours, ideally overnight, to dissolve fully.
- Confectioners' XXX sugarA grading term for powdered sugar, coarser than the 10X sold today. Modern confectioners' sugar works directly, but it contains cornstarch as an anti-caking agent, so start at the low end of the quantity and add more only as the paste demands.
- Rose waterStill sold, though strengths vary widely between bottlings and some are much stronger than others. Add it drop by drop as the kneading liquid or the lozenges will taste of soap.
- "The hard snap"The hard-crack stage, 300-310F on a thermometer. The old test was a drop of syrup in cold water that shatters rather than bends.
- HorehoundMarrubium vulgare, the bitter mint sold dried in herb shops. Roughly 1 oz dried leaf simmered in 2 cups water for ten minutes, then strained, gives a usable decoction. It is genuinely bitter and the sugar is doing most of the work.
- ScaleTen pounds of sugar for the tar candy is a commercial-size batch, and the almond lozenges, at 1½ pounds of sugar plus a pound of almonds, still make a large quantity. Quarter the almond lozenges and you will still get several dozen pieces.
- ColoringThe intense jarred colors described are what we now call gel or paste food coloring. Supermarket liquid colors are much weaker and will thin fondant noticeably if you use enough to get a deep shade.
Lozenges of this kind sat on the border between the confectioner's counter and the druggist's, which is why a household book prints them alongside bonbons. The technique — gum arabic mucilage stiffened with powdered sugar, kneaded, rolled and stamped — is the same one used for pharmaceutical troches, and it needs no cooking, only drying, which made it practical for home makers without a candy thermometer. Horehound has been the standard bitter cough sweet in English-speaking kitchens for centuries and is still sold as a drop. Pine tar preparations were equally respectable in 1900: tar water, tar syrup and tar lozenges all appear in period dispensatories, and their disappearance from the shelf reflects twentieth-century thinking about what belongs in food rather than any change in the recipe. The closing notes on coating fondant in a deeper shade of its own color are a professional confectioner's habit, and a reminder that these home books were often written by people copying trade practice down for domestic readers.