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Candies and Candy Making: Roll
Roll out plain white fondant ¼ inch thick and 4 inches in width, and roll up the fruit roll in the plain fondant as a cover. Let stand over night to harden, cut into 4-inch lengths, cover with melted chocolate, and lay on waxed paper to cool.
Jelly Rolls. - Make crab - apple, currant, or any other jelly as stiff as possible, and pour out on a buttered tin pan to the depth of 1/4 inch.
Roll out on a molding board dusted with Confectioners' XXX sugar, cornstarch, or flour a layer of plain French cream or fondant 1 inch thick, turn over the pan so that the sheet of jelly will lie upon this, and roll up the two in the same fashion as jelly cake. Let stand to harden, cut into slices.
Fruit Tarts. Lay ripe small fruit, as raspberries, cherries, plums, and the like, in glass fruit jars and cover each pound of fruit with 6 ounces of powdered loaf sugar. Seal the jar, set it in boiling water up to the neck, and boil for 3 hours. The jars must be kept sealed until required for use.
Fruit Lozenges. -Place any small fruits, as currants, raspberries, cherries, and plums, in glass or earthenware jars set in boiling water. Scald and strain the fruit through a sieve.
Add to each pint of juice an equal weight of finely sifted sugar and the white of an egg. Whip the whole to a stiff froth, drop on buttered paper, and place in a slow oven. As soon as they will loosen from the paper turn them and let stand in the oven until quite dry. Cut to any desired shape, pack between waxed papers, and keep in a dry place.
Macaroons. - These popular confections are usually made of sweet or bitter almonds with sugar and the white of eggs, but sometimes with other substances, as nuts, flavoring matter, and the like. To make macaroons blanch and pulverize a pound of almonds, adding a little rose water to form a moist elastic mass. Beat to a stiff froth the whites of 7 eggs, stir in the almonds and a pound of Confectioners' XXX sugar.
Drop the macaroons in the desired size on buttered paper from a spoon, and brown on tin plates in a slow baking oven. Set them aside in the pan in which they were baked until cold.
Or pound 4 ounces of blanched sweet almonds with 4 tablespoonfuls of orange flower or rose water. Beat up the whites of 4 eggs to a stiff froth and stir all together with 1 pound of Confectioners' XXX sugar.
A run of confectionery entries printed as one block, of which two cannot be attempted as given: the "Fruit Tarts" are an unsafe canning method, and the macaroons offer bitter almonds as an option. The fondant and jelly rolls are workable once the units are read correctly.
- Why the fruit jars failFilling jars with raw fruit and sugar, sealing them, and then setting them in boiling water for three hours is pre-modern canning. A sealed rigid jar in a boiling bath has no way to vent expanding air and can fail; more importantly the book gives no headspace, no jar size and no cooling procedure, so there is no way to know the contents were processed. Use a current tested recipe for putting up soft fruit.
- Bitter almondsBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nuts are ground and wetted — exactly what this recipe does with rose water. They are not sold for eating in the United States and a pound of them is far outside any safe range. Historic macaroon recipes used a few for flavour; the modern equivalent of that flavour is a drop of almond extract.
- The jelly-roll layer thicknessThe jelly layer is poured ¼ inch deep, but the fondant sheet it is rolled with is given as 1 inch thick; that figure sits oddly with the rest of the method and is likely meant to be ¼ inch as well. Roll the fondant thin enough to wrap the jelly without cracking, and work by eye.
- Confectioners' XXX sugarPeriod XXX sugar was coarser than today's 10X, which contains cornstarch. Modern powdered sugar works throughout; sift it in any case.
- Powdered loaf sugarLoaf sugar was cone sugar broken and crushed at home. Plain granulated is the equivalent.
- French cream and fondantBoth names here mean the same thing: a cooked sugar syrup worked to a white paste. "Plain white fondant" is unflavoured and uncoloured, meant as a wrapper rather than a filling.
- A slow ovenRoughly 250 to 300F. For the fruit lozenges, lower still — 200 to 250F with the door cracked — since the object is to dry them, not colour them. The macaroons want the upper end of that slow range, and should be left on their pan to cool, as the book says, or they tear.
- Fruit lozengesOne pint of juice to an equal weight of sugar means roughly 1 lb sugar to the pint; the egg white is what makes the froth hold. They are dried meringues and will go sticky in humid air, so the "dry place" instruction is doing real work.
- YieldThe larger macaroon batch — a pound of nuts, a pound of sugar, seven whites — makes something on the order of six dozen small cakes. The second version, at a quarter the nuts, is the more sensible household quantity.
Household Discoveries belongs to the turn-of-the-century encyclopaedia trade, where candy making sat in the same volume as laundry bluing and furniture polish, and for good reason: boiled sugar work was one of the few luxury goods a household could produce from cheap staples once refined sugar became abundant in the 1880s and 1890s. The techniques here are lifted straight from professional confectionery — fondant rolled as a sheet and wrapped around a centre, then enrobed in chocolate, is shop practice scaled to a kitchen table. Almond macaroons are far older, generally traced to Italian monastic and Jewish baking and reaching France by the sixteenth century, and older recipes did specify a proportion of bitter almonds for their intensity; the rose water and orange flower water in both versions are survivals of that early modern almond-and-flower-water school of confectionery, long before vanilla became the default sweet flavouring. The canned-fruit entry sitting in the middle of the candy section is a reminder that preserving and confectionery were the same craft to a Victorian cook — both were sugar used to make food keep.