Turkish Sweetmeat
INGREDIENTS.-2 1/2 lbs. of sugar, 2 eggs, 1 lemon, lb. of finest wheat starch, 2 pints of water, flavouring of rose.
Make a syrup with a quart of water and the sugar, and clear it with the juice of the lemon and the whites of the eggs. Dissolve the starch in 1/2 pint of cold water, strain, and add it to the syrup when boiling, and continue to boil until the mixture is stringy and thick, then add the flavouring. Have ready two large dishes, one oiled, the other SEASONABLE. In full season from June covered with sifted sugar, pour the mixture to October.
Turkey Soup. (A Seasonable dish at Christmas.) - INGREDIENTS for soup for 8 or 10 persons.-2 quarts of medium stock, the remains of a cold roast turkey, 2 oz. of rice-flour or arrowroot, salt and pepper to taste, 1 tablespoonful of Harvey's sauce or mushroom ketchup. AVERAGE COST, Id. per quart.
Cut up the turkey in small pieces, and put it in the stock; let it simmer slowly until the bones are quite clean. Take the bones out, and work the soup through a sieve; when cool, skim well. Mix the rice-flour or arrowroot to a batter with a little of the soup; add it with the seasoning and sauce, or ketchup. Give one boil , and serve.
TIME.-4 hours.
SEASONABLE. - At Christmas.
Note. Instead of thickening this soup, vermicelli or macaroni may be served in it. Turkey Stew. INGREDIENTS for plain supper dish for 6 persons. The carcass and inferior parts of a cold turkey, 3/4 lb. of macaroni, salt and pepper, water. AVERAGE COST, exclusive of the cold turkey, 5d.
Chop up the carcass of the turkey, and put it with plenty of water to cover itand the macaroni in a stewpan. Add the seasoning and a little pounded mace, if liked, and stew all gently for an hour, adding more water if the macaroni absorbs it. Shake the pan occasionally to prevent it sticking to the bottom of the stewpan.
Before serving take out the turkey bones, cut off any meat upon them, and put it back in small pieces to the stew to get hot. through.
TIME.-1 to 1 hour.
SEASONABLE in winter.
Note.
This is a cheap and nice dish for a supper in winter, and if liked, grated cheese may on the oiled one, and let it stand for a minute or two to cool, then turn on to the sugared one, soak up any oil that remains, cut into squares, and cover with sugar, so that, in putting away, the squares do not stick together.
This is Turkish delight (lokum) made the older way, with wheat starch rather than cornflour, and clarified with egg white. It is straightforward but demands patience at the boiling stage.
- The starch quantity is incompleteThe ingredient list gives "lb. of finest wheat starch" with the fraction lost, so the figure cannot be recovered with confidence. Something in the region of 1/2 lb would suit this quantity of sugar, but treat any figure you adopt as a starting point and judge by the thickness of the boiling mixture.
- Water: the two figures disagreeThe list says 2 pints, but the method calls for a quart (2 pints) for the syrup plus a further 1/2 pint to slake the starch, i.e. 2 1/2 pints in all. Work from the method.
- Clearing the syrupLemon juice and lightly beaten egg white are added to the cold syrup, then brought up slowly; the coagulating white carries scum to the surface, where it is skimmed off. Do not stir once it begins to clarify, and strain through muslin before adding the starch.
- Wheat starch and substitutesThe recipe calls for the finest wheat starch. Cornflour behaves very similarly here and is what most modern versions use; slake it in the cold water and strain, as directed, or it will lump.
- "Stringy and thick" is the hingeThis is a long, slow cook -- often an hour or more of gentle boiling with frequent stirring, not a few minutes. The paste is ready when it turns from milky to translucent gold and a spoonful drawn up leaves a thick, elastic thread. Undercooked, it will never set; scorched, the whole batch takes a burnt taste, so use a heavy pan and a low flame.
- Rose flavouringAdd rosewater off the heat, as boiling drives off the perfume. Rosewater sold today varies enormously in strength -- start with a tablespoon, taste, and add more. Concentrated rose essence should be counted in drops.
- Setting and cuttingOil the first dish very lightly with a flavourless oil. A depth of about 3/4 inch is right. The instruction to "stand for a minute or two" understates it: the slab needs several hours, and preferably overnight, before it will cut cleanly with an oiled knife.
- The sugar coating"Sifted sugar" here means finely powdered sugar. Modern icing sugar usually contains a little starch or other anti-caking agent and works well; a half-and-half mix of icing sugar and cornflour is the usual dusting and keeps the squares from weeping and sticking in storage.
- YieldTwo pounds of sugar with the syrup and starch gives something in the region of 3 lb of finished sweetmeat; the number of squares depends on the depth of the slab. Store in a tin between layers of the sugar mixture, not in the refrigerator.
Turkish delight reached British kitchens in quantity during the nineteenth century, when it was imported and sold as a luxury confection; by the time of Mrs Beeton's later editions, household manuals were offering recipes for making it at home. The Turkish original, lokum (from rahat-ul hulkum, roughly "ease of the throat"), is generally traced to the confectioners of Istanbul in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and its texture depends entirely on the long boiling of starch with sugar syrup. The clarifying of the syrup with egg white and lemon juice, described here as a matter of course, was standard practice in an era when refined sugar was less reliably pure than it is now.