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Candies and Candy Making: Sirup
Sirup for Candied Sweetmeats.- Boil down clarified sirup to the feather degree, or 35 degrees by a sirup tester. Quickly remove the pan from the fire and set it into a dish of cold water, iced water, if possible, coming up all around the sides so as to cool it as quickly as possible. Lay over the top of the sugar a piece of waxed paper cut to fit the inside of the saucepan. When entirely cold, stir the sirup over the sweetmeats to be candied. A special utensil can be obtained for this purpose, having corrugated tubes at the bottom from which the sirup may be drained off.
Or the sweetmeats may be placed in a small basket strainer and put in the sirup, which may be placed in an earthenware or other roundbottomed vessel slightly larger in size than the strainer. The whole should be covered tightly and placed in a refrigerator, cellar, or the coldest place attainable. A temperature below the freezing point is desirable, After standing over night, or about eighteen hours in this temperature, the strainer containing sweetmeats should be lifted from the sirup (which should be drained off), and without being removed from the strainer should be placed in a clean vessel and allowed to dry and complete the crystallization. Sirup for Molds. - To prepare a sirup for lead molds or starch prints, boil together to the soft ball 2 cupfuls of sugar, 1 large tablespoonful of glucose, cupful of water.
Or test by tangling a yard or more of fine wire in a mass of loops, dip this in the sirup, lift and blow through them, when, if the sirup is done, bubbles will be formed and the sirup will be feathery and fly off in flakes. Now pour on a moistened molding board or on a marble slab to cool. When lukewarm, cream with a wooden paddle and set away in an earthenware bowl covered with several folds of wet cloth. Let stand twenty-four hours or more before using. To use this fondant set the required quantity in an earthenware bowl in a double boiler over a dying fire and stir constantly until melted.
But do not let the fire burn up or the sirup approach the boiling point, as if it simmers or boils it will grain.
At this stage add any desired flavoring or coloring matter. - Sirup for Crystals.
Two related confectioner's syrups: a saturated candying syrup for crystallising preserved fruit, and a fondant syrup cast into moulds. The second half directs the cook to pour melted fondant into lead moulds, and that is where the page stops being usable.
- Lead mouldsCasting confectionery in lead was ordinary trade practice when this was written and is the reason the page carries a caution. Hot sugar held against lead picks up the metal, there is no safe level of dietary lead, and children are the usual eaters of moulded candy. Nothing about the rest of the method makes that step acceptable; use a current confectionery recipe and modern food-grade moulds.
- "35 degrees by a sirup tester"The tester is most likely a density gauge, probably graduated in degrees Baume, rather than a thermometer reading a boiling stage. Around 35 Baume corresponds to a heavy, near-saturated syrup of roughly 64 percent sugar, whereas the "feather degree" is a boiled stage well above that. Hydrometer readings also shift with the temperature of the syrup, so how the two figures were meant to agree is not resolved by the original.
- The blown-bubble testThe wire-loop test is the old "feather" or "souffle" check, generally placed in the 240s Fahrenheit. It survives in French practice as the plume stage and is genuinely reliable, but a thermometer does the same job without a mouthful of hot sugar vapour.
- GlucoseIn a 1900s candy chapter this means commercial glucose syrup, the interfering sugar that keeps fondant from graining. Modern corn syrup is the direct descendant.
- A missing fraction"Cupful of water" against two cupfuls of sugar reads as though a fraction has dropped out in the setting; many period fondant formulas call for about half a cup or less to two cups of sugar. Treat the printed quantity as doubtful rather than literal.
- "A dying fire"Remelting fondant wants gentle, indirect heat, well under a simmer. The warning is the real point of the paragraph: let fondant reach the boil and the fine crystal structure coarsens and the finish goes gritty.
- Cold candyingHolding the fruit in saturated syrup near or below freezing for eighteen hours forces sugar out of solution onto the surface. It is a slow crystallising method rather than the warm sequential syrup soaks used in most modern candied-peel recipes, and it produces a visibly sparkling rather than glassy coat.
- Starch printsThese are impressions stamped into a tray of dried cornstarch, the mogul process still used industrially for jellies and creams. Unlike the lead moulds, the technique itself is sound and remains in use.
This sits in a candy chapter at a moment when confectionery was moving out of the professional sugar-boiler's shop and into the domestic kitchen. The vocabulary gives it away: feather degree, syrup tester, glucose, starch prints and lead moulds are all trade terms, lifted more or less intact from commercial practice and handed to a home cook with a saucepan and a cellar. The candying instructions, with their insistence on a cold cellar and eighteen hours undisturbed, reflect a kitchen where a refrigerator was one option among several and the coldest corner of the house was a real piece of equipment.