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Confectionery (This is made by boiling)
This is made by boiling lemon-peel with sugar, and then exposing to the air until the sugar crystallizes. To Color Candied Sugar.
Red. Boil an ounce of cochineal in half a pint of water for five minutes, add an ounce of cream of tartar, 1/2 an ounce of pounded alum, and boil them on a slow fire ten minutes; if it shows the color clear on white paper, it is sufficient. Add 2 ounces of sugar, and bottle it for use.
Blue. Put a little warm water on a plate, and rub an indigo-stone in it till the color has come to the tint required.
Yellow. Rub with some water a little gamboge on a plate; or infuse the heart of a yellow lily flower with milk-warm water.
The first sentence is a serviceable sketch of candied lemon peel, but everything after it is a set of nineteenth-century dyer's colours applied to food, and two of the three have no place near anything that will be eaten.
- Gamboge is the deal-breakerGamboge is the dried gum-resin of Garcinia trees, used as a pigment and, in Victorian medicine, as a drastic purgative. Even small amounts cause violent vomiting and diarrhoea; it is not a permitted food colour anywhere today.
- The "indigo-stone"This is a lump of compressed indigo dye. Ground pigment stone is not food-grade material, and whatever it carries with it is the concern.
- Alum in this quantityAn ounce of pounded alum boiled into half a pint of liquid is a mordant dose, not a culinary one. Alum has a place in old pickling receipts at a fraction of this strength; here it exists to fix dye.
- Cochineal itself is not the issueCochineal (carmine) is still a legal food colour and is what gives the red here. The problem is the company it keeps in this formula, and that a minority of people react to carmine — it must be declared on modern labels for that reason.
- If you want coloured candied peelUse a current recipe and commercial food colouring. Nothing in the three colour formulas above can be salvaged by adjusting proportions.
- On the units, for reading purposesHalf a pint is 8 fl oz (one US cup) or 10 fl oz if read as imperial; an ounce here is weight, roughly 28 g. "Shows the color clear on white paper" appears to be a tint test — a drop drawn out on paper to judge the colour.
- The lemon peel partBoiling peel in sugar syrup and then air-drying until the surface sugars crystallize is genuine and still done; it takes a day or more of drying in a warm, dry place, and the peel wants blanching first to draw out bitterness. The original gives no quantities, syrup density or timing, so treat it as a description rather than a working method.
Mackenzie's Ten Thousand Receipts was a compendium that drew as freely on the dyer's, the apothecary's and the painter's trades as on the kitchen, and this page shows the seam. Gamboge, indigo and cochineal were all sitting on the same colourman's shelf in the early nineteenth century, sold to artists and to confectioners alike, and the notion that a substance safe on paper was safe on a sweet, though challenged early — Fredrick Accum's 1820 treatise on adulteration already singled out mineral-coloured confectionery — was not widely acted upon until mid-century food-adulteration scandals in Britain: Arthur Hill Hassall's microscope work in the 1850s and the poisonings traced to mineral-coloured comfits forced the question. Confectionery was among the worst offenders precisely because bright colour was the selling point: greens from copper, yellows from lead chromate and gamboge, reds from vermilion. Cochineal, an insect dye carried into Europe from Mexico after the Spanish conquest, is the one colour on this list that survived the reckoning, and it is still on ingredient labels today as carmine.