Confectionery
In speaking of confectionery, it should be remarked that many preparations come under that head; for the various fruits, flowers, herbs, roots, and juices which, when boiled with sugar, were formerly employed in pharmacy as well as for sweetmeats, were called confections, from the Latin word conficere, "to make up;" but the term confectionary embraces a very large class indeed of sweet foods, many kinds of which should not be attempted in the ordinary cuisine. Apart from these-cakes, biscuits and tarts, &c., the class of sweetmeats, called confections may be thus classified:-1. Liquid confects, or fruits, either whole or in pieces, preserved by being immersed in a fluid transparent syrup; as the liquid confects of apricots, green citrons, and many foreign fruits. 2. Dry confects are those which, after having been boiled in the syrup, are taken out and put to dry in an oven, as citron and orange-peel, &c. 3. Marmalade, jams and pastes, a kind of soft compounds made of the pulp of fruits or other vegetable substances, beaten up with sugar or honey; such as oranges, apricots, pears, &c. 4. Jellies are the juices of fruits boiled with sugar to a pretty thick consistency, so as, upon cooling, to form a trembling jelly; as currant, gooseberry, apple jelly, &c. 5. Conserves are a kind of dry confects, made by beating up flowers, fruits, &c., with sugar, not dissolved. 6.
Candies are fruits candied over with sugar after having been boiled in the syrup.
Scotch confectioners are generally considered the cleverest, next to the French, and Wotherspoon & Co., of Paisley, are a celebrated firm. Sweets, such as toffee, candies, fruit-drops, &c., are now so cheap that few people think it worth while to make them for the children; but many of these bought sweets are greatly adulterated, and instead of risking the harm that these cheap sweets might do, it would be well now and then to make a little store of good wholesome home-made ones, such as Everton toffee or barley sugar.
Corn Cake. (Very good for a Breakfast Cake.) - INGREDIENTS for 4 cakes. lb. of corn meal, 1 egg, lb. of golden syrup, 2 teaspoonfuls of baking powder, milk, salt. AVERAGE COST, 4d.
Mix all the ingredients together, using as much milk as is required to make them into a stiff paste. Bake on buttered tin plates in a quick oven and serve hot, TIME, -20 minutes.
SEASONABLE at any time, COW-HEEL STOCK.
The bulk of this entry is a classification essay, but a working recipe is tucked in at the end: a griddle-free corn cake baked in tin plates. A few things in it need translating.
- The missing fractionsThe printed quantities read "lb. of corn meal" and "lb. of golden syrup" — the fraction marks have dropped out of the text. From the yield (four small cakes) and the cost of 4d., half a pound of each is the plausible reading, but this is genuinely uncertain and worth treating as a starting point rather than a formula. A pound of syrup to a pound of meal would give something closer to a confection than a breakfast cake.
- Corn mealThis is cornmeal, not cornflour (British cornflour is cornstarch, a different thing entirely). Use a medium or fine yellow meal; a coarse stone-ground grind will stay gritty in a 20-minute bake unless the batter is left to hydrate first.
- Golden syrupAn invert sugar syrup, refined from cane and still sold under the same name in Britain. It is less sweet and more caramel-flavoured than light corn syrup, which is the nearest substitute; honey works but shifts the flavour and browns faster.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400–425°F (200–220°C). At that heat the 20-minute time is about right for thin cakes; the sugar content means they will colour quickly, so check at 15 minutes.
- Tin platesShallow tin plates of the pie-dish sort; the book gives no size. Any thin metal round tin or a well-buttered cast-iron pan gives the same effect: a broad, thin cake with a lot of crust relative to crumb.
- "Stiff paste"Not a pourable batter. Beeton wants a thick spoonable mixture that holds a shape when dropped onto the plate, which is what keeps these cakes from spreading into wafers. Add the milk a little at a time.
- SaltUnmeasured, as often in this book. About a half teaspoon for half a pound of meal; without it the syrup makes the cakes cloying.
- ServingFour cakes, meant hot from the oven; the recipe says only "serve hot". They stale fast, as cornmeal baking tends to, and are best eaten the day they are made.
The essay above the recipe is doing etymology as much as cookery: confection from Latin conficere, to make up, and the reminder that fruits, flowers, roots and juices boiled with sugar once belonged to the apothecary as much as to the sweet shop. That overlap is real — preserving in sugar was a medicinal technique before it was a dessert one, and conserves of roses and violets sat in pharmacopoeias for centuries. The six-part classification (liquid confects, dry confects, marmalades, jellies, conserves, candies) is one that recurs in encyclopaedias and cookery books of the period rather than a documented trade standard, and the warning about adulterated shop sweets reflects a genuine Victorian anxiety: cheap boiled sugar goods were repeatedly found coloured with metallic pigments, and public alarm over such adulteration ran through the second half of the nineteenth century. Wotherspoon & Co. of Paisley were a real Scottish confectionery and starch firm, named in the text. The corn cake appended at the end has nothing to do with any of it — American cornmeal baking had entered British household books by this period, and the plainer explanation is visible on the page itself: Confectionery, Corn Cake, Cow-heel Stock is an alphabetical run.