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Candies and Candy Making: Pour
Or pour over a little clean white gum shellac sufficient alcohol to cover it, and let stand over night. Pour off the clear solution from the sediment, dilute with alcohol, and apply to the burnt almonds with a brush.
CARAMELS To make caramels in general boil clarified sugar until it is very brittle or to the point where it begins to gain more or less color and give off an acrid smell. But care must be taken not to burn the sugar or darken it beyond a light-brown shade. Then pour the sirup on an oiled marble slab or tin, let cool until nearly hard, mark in small squares or cut out with a mold and lay away on waxed paper to harden.
If no suitable mold is at hand mark off the slab inch deep or more with the back of a case knife and sprinkle slightly with powdered sugar to keep the marks open.
Two separate items run together here: the tail end of a shellac glaze for burnt almonds, and a general method for hard sugar caramels. The glaze is the problem; the sugar work is sound and still recognisable.
- Why the glaze failsShellac here is dissolved in alcohol, and in a book of this period that could well have been wood or denatured alcohol (methanol), which is poisonous in small amounts and is not driven off reliably by brushing and air-drying. Even where grain spirit was meant, ordinary hardware shellac is unrefined and may carry wax and other non-food residues. Food-grade confectioner's glaze exists, but it is not this; use a current recipe if you want glazed nuts.
- The caramel is a hard candy, not a chewDespite the name, there is no cream or butter here. This is caramelised sugar poured, scored and snapped — closer to a burnt-sugar brittle than to the milk caramels the word suggests today.
- Read the sugar with a thermometerThe book gives none. "Very brittle" corresponds roughly to hard crack, about 300-310F. Colour and the sharp smell come later, somewhere above about 320-340F, and a light-brown caramel is generally past by around 350F, after which it turns bitter quickly -- which is the point of the warning not to darken beyond light brown.
- Clarified sugarSugar boiled with water and clarified with egg white or skimmed of scum — a step nineteenth-century loaf sugar needed and modern granulated sugar does not. Plain sugar with water, and a spoon of glucose or corn syrup, gives a cleaner result with less risk of graining.
- Oiled marble or tinA marble slab wiped with a neutral oil is still the best surface; a heavy rimmed baking sheet lined with a silicone mat works as well and needs no oil.
- Marking the slabScore when the sheet has set enough to hold a line but is still warm — roughly the point where a fingerprint no longer sinks in. The dusting of powdered sugar keeps the scored channels from flowing back together as the candy relaxes.
- StorageWaxed paper and a tightly closed tin. Caramelised sugar draws moisture from the air quickly and goes tacky in a day if left open.
Burnt almonds — sugar-coated nuts cooked until the coating caramelises — were a staple of the confectioner's trade long before they were a home project, and the shellac wash described here belongs to that trade rather than to cookery. Confectioners have used shellac dissolved in spirit to put a hard shine on pills, pan-coated nuts and dragées since at least the nineteenth century, and the practice survives in the "confectioner's glaze" still listed on candy labels. What marks this passage as a household book of its period is that gum shellac and alcohol are named as ingredients alongside sugar. The caramel note that follows is of its time as well: "caramel" then still meant chiefly the browned sugar itself, even as the soft, milk-enriched chew shared the name in America.