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Sugar, to Boil, to Caramel
INGREDIENTS. To every lb. of lump sugar allow 1 gill of spring water.
Boil the sugar and water together very quickly over a clear fire, skimming it very carefully as soon as it boils. Keep it boiling until the sugar snaps when a little of it is dropped.into a pan of cold water. If it remains hard, the sugar has attained the right degree; then squeeze in a little lemonjuice, and let it remain an instant on the fire. Set the pan into another of cold water, and the caramel is then ready for use.
The insides of well-oiled moulds are often ornamented with this sugar, which, with a fork, should be spread over them in fine threads or network. A dish of light pastry, tastefully arranged, or a compote of fruit, look very pretty with this sugar spun lightly over it.
This is a sugar syrup taken to the hard-crack stage and used for spun sugar and lined moulds. Everything depends on the temperature, so a sugar thermometer removes all the guesswork the original leaves in.
- The hinge: the snap testA drop in cold water that sets hard and shatters is the hard-crack stage, 300-310F (149-154C). If it bends rather than snaps you are still at soft crack and the threads will droop and go sticky within minutes.
- A gillIn Beeton's British measure a gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, about 5 fl oz or 150 ml, to each pound (450 g) of sugar. American editions of the period often mean 4 fl oz. Either works, since all the water boils off; the volume only sets how long you wait.
- Lump sugarLump or loaf sugar was hard refined sugar broken from a cone, prized because it was clean and free of molasses. Ordinary granulated white sugar is the modern equivalent and needs no skimming; the scum Beeton removes was impurity from less refined stock.
- Why the lemon juiceThe acid inverts part of the sucrose and stops the syrup crystallising into an opaque grainy mass. Add it as directed, right at the end, and only a few drops per pound. Added at the start it can work too thoroughly and leave the sugar slow to set.
- "Caramel" here does not mean brownNineteenth-century confectioners used caramel loosely for hard-boiled sugar work. True caramelisation begins around 340F (170C). If you want colour, carry it a little past hard crack to a pale straw, but a dark caramel will taste bitter in threads this fine.
- Cooling the panStanding the pan in cold water stops the residual heat carrying the sugar on to burning. Keep the water shallow and well below the rim; a splash into 300F sugar erupts violently.
- Do not stir, and wash the sides downOnce boiling, leave it alone. Brush the inside of the pan above the syrup with a wet pastry brush to dissolve stray crystals, which are what set off graining.
- Spinning and liningLet the syrup thicken for a minute or two off the heat until it trails from a fork in a fine thread, then flick it over an oiled mould or a lightly oiled bowl. Work in a dry room: humidity turns spun sugar limp, and it will not keep more than a couple of hours.
- YieldA pound of sugar makes far more spun work than one dessert needs. Half quantities, about 8 oz sugar to half a gill (2 1/2 fl oz, roughly 5 tablespoons) of water, are enough to veil a single compote or pastry dish.
Boiled sugar work was the confectioner's showpiece long before it reached the domestic kitchen, and the stages Beeton describes by dropping syrup into cold water — thread, ball, crack — were the trade's only thermometer for centuries. Spun sugar and sugar-lined moulds belonged to the elaborate entremets of French service that English households were imitating through the middle of the nineteenth century, and entries like this one appear in Beeton because her readers were expected to produce, without a trained confectioner, the kind of table decoration a great house's kitchen staff would once have supplied. The lump sugar specified is a reminder of how sugar was actually sold then: in hard conical loaves that had to be broken with nippers, granulated sugar in bags being a later convenience of industrial refining.