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Hoarhound Candy
Hoarhound 2 cups boiling water 2 pounds sugar White of 1 egg Pour the water on as much hoarhound as it will cover; steep it on a slow fire for several hours; then strain and put the same water on a fresh supply of hoarhound and steep as before. Add enough boiling water to make a full pint; strain and when cold add the beaten white of egg and the sugar. Boil it slowly until thick, removing the scum that rises. Test by dropping from a spoon into cold water: when it hardens quickly it is done. Pour into buttered tins; mark off in small squares and set aside to cool. When cold break it up and put it in glass jars.
A two-ingredient herbal hard candy whose only real difficulty is knowing when the syrup is done. The original gives no weight for the herb and no thermometer reading, so both need translating.
- How much horehound"As much hoarhound as it will cover" with 2 cups of water works out to roughly 1 to 1.5 oz of dried horehound leaf, loosely packed, for each of the two steepings. Dried horehound is sold by herb suppliers and tea shops; fresh, if you grow it, is milder and you need about three times as much by volume.
- The steeping is the flavourTwo long infusions on the same water make a strong, bitter decoction. Hours on a slow fire is more than is needed for extraction, so keep it barely at a simmer and covered enough that you can still bring it back to a full pint at the end.
- Hard crack, and the number"Hardens quickly" in cold water means the hard-crack stage, 300-310F (150-155C). Below about 290F the candy stays tacky and will weep in the jar. A thermometer is worth using; the cold-water test alone leaves a wide margin.
- The egg whiteBeaten white added to the cold liquid is a clarifying agent, not a leavener. It coagulates as the syrup heats and carries plant sediment to the surface as scum, which you skim. It contributes nothing to the finished candy and can be left out if your decoction is well strained.
- Do not stir once it boilsAfter the sugar dissolves, leave the syrup alone and wash any crystals down the pan sides with a wet brush. Stirring hot sugar syrup seeds crystallisation and turns the batch grainy.
- Marking the squaresPour onto a buttered rimmed sheet or marble slab and score with an oiled knife when the sheet has set but still gives under pressure, about 5 to 8 minutes. Left too long it will not break cleanly along the marks, which is what the recipe intends when it says break it up.
- StorageHard candy is hygroscopic. Toss the broken pieces in a little powdered sugar or wrap individually before jarring, and keep the jar sealed; in a humid kitchen unwrapped pieces fuse into one mass within a day or two.
- YieldTwo pounds of sugar makes about 2 lb of finished candy, roughly 80 to 100 small squares.
Horehound (Marrubium vulgare), a grey, bitter member of the mint family, has been used against coughs and sore throats since antiquity and was a standard item in kitchen gardens and apothecary shops alike. Boiling the decoction with sugar was the ordinary way of making a bitter medicine palatable and portable, which is why horehound drops sat as comfortably in the candy chapter of a household book as in the medicine cupboard; the spelling "hoarhound" reflects the older sense of hoar, meaning hoary or white, from the felted grey down on the leaves. By the time Mrs. Fryer's loose-leaf book appeared, commercial horehound drops were sold across America, but the herb still grew as a weed on waste ground in much of the country, and making the candy at home cost little more than the sugar. The flavour, faintly medicinal and closer to root beer than to peppermint, is the reason it has largely survived as a nostalgia item rather than a common sweet.