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Candies and Candy Making: Sugar
To Color Pink. - Use a little carmine moistened with rose water. Granite Sugar. Crush by cracking it with a hammer a pound of fine loaf sugar into small lumps. Place these on a hard, smooth surface and break them up fine with a wooden mallet or any smooth piece of hard wood. Shake first through a coarse sieve to remove the lumps, and afterwards through a very fine sieve to remove the powdered sugar. The result will be in grains of intermediate size, like coarse sand or gravel, known by confectioners as granite sugar.
To Color Granite Sugar. Any of the above coloring matters may be used to tint granite sugar to any desired stage. Pour a few drops of the coloring matter on a plate, spread the sugar over this, and dry on a screen with very moderate heat.
While drying, rub the sugar frequently between the hands to prevent the corners sticking together. Preserve in a closely stoppered glass bottle in a warm, dry place for use.
Flavorings for Candy. Buy only the most expensive grades of flavoring extracts for candies. Every firstclass dealer has the better qualities or can obtain them on request. This is important for two reasons: the flavor of the candy will be improved and a few drops only will be required. The less moisture added to fondant the easier it is to work.
Or buy the essential oils of rose, wintergreen, peppermint, cloves, and others, drop them on lump sugar, pulverize the sugar with a rollingpin and carefully preserve in tightly stoppered bottles until required for use.
To Flavor Sugar. As a matter of convenience in flavoring candies, it is customary with confectioners to flavor in advance a quantity of loaf or other sugar and have it in readiness to be mixed with sirup to impart any flavoring that may be desired. Flavoring matter should not be added to Sirup until the process of boiling is at an end and the sirup is ready to be taken from the fire, otherwise the flavor, which is usually imparted by one of the volatile essential oils, will be evaporated and lost.
This is a cluster of confectioner's preparations rather than a single sweet: colored sanding sugar, and sugar pre-charged with flavor so that no extra water goes into a fondant. Both still work, and both are cheaper to make than to buy.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was hard refined sugar sold in cones or cut cubes, denser than modern granulated. Sugar cubes are the nearest thing on a shelf today and crush much the same way; a pound is roughly 2 1/4 cups of granulated equivalent.
- What granite sugar isIt is what is now sold as sanding sugar or coarse decorating sugar — crystals larger than granulated, used to coat and sparkle rather than to dissolve. The two-sieve step is the whole method: a coarse sieve removes the unbroken lumps, a fine one drops out the powder, and what stays between — the book's 'coarse sand or gravel' — is the product.
- Crush cold and dryWork on a board or between sheets of parchment, not bare stone, and keep everything dry. Damp sugar packs instead of fracturing, and you end up with paste rather than grains.
- CarmineCarmine is cochineal, an insect-derived red still permitted and still labeled as carmine or E120. Carmine lake dissolves poorly in water; the rose water here also serves as a flavoring. Buy it as a food-grade liquid or powder, and note that a small number of people react to it.
- Drying the colored sugar"Very moderate heat" means barely warm — an oven at its lowest setting with the door propped, or simply overnight on a tray in a dry room. Too much heat, and the damp crystals set into clumps instead of drying loose, which is why the book has you rub them between the hands as they dry.
- Essential oils are not all food gradeThe oils of peppermint, wintergreen, clove and rose the book means are the confectioner's flavoring oils, sold today as candy oils. Aromatherapy oils from a pharmacy or craft shop are not intended to be eaten and are often far more concentrated; wintergreen oil in particular is dangerous in quantity. Buy oils explicitly labeled for food use and count drops.
- Flavored sugar, in practiceOne or two drops of oil per ounce of crushed sugar is plenty. Roll it in thoroughly, let it sit a day so the oil distributes, and keep it in a tightly closed glass jar away from light — volatile oils fade in a paper packet within weeks.
- The instruction that mattersFlavoring goes in off the heat. The volatile oils are readily driven off by the heat and steam of a boiling syrup, so anything added while the pan is still on the burner is largely lost to the air — which is exactly the reason the book gives.
These entries belong to the period when a home cook still bought sugar in hard refined lumps and reduced it herself to whatever grade the job needed — powdered for icing, granite for sanding, syrup for boiled work. Sugar was sold in loaves or cones well into the nineteenth century, and the sugar nippers and mallets that broke them up survived in kitchen drawers long after cube and granulated sugar arrived. Carmine, the pink here, is made from cochineal insects and had been the confectioner's red since the trade reached Europe from Spanish America. The advice to buy the most expensive extracts is a quiet comment on a related problem: adulterated and diluted flavorings were common enough to be a recognized concern, and a book like this one assumed its reader had to judge a dealer for herself.