Almond Candy
1 pound or a little less of almonds blanched and split. 2 pounds of granulated sugar. 1 pint scant of water. 1 large teaspoonful of powdered gum arabic. 1 level teaspoonful of cream of tartar. Rose extract to slightly flavor. Dissolve the gum in the water made warm, add the sugar and cream tartar and boil without stirring 15 or 20 minutes. When a drop in cold water sets nearly hard so that it can only just be pressed flat between the finger and thumb take the kettle off the fire. Drop the flavoring by spots over the surface, give the candy only one or two turns with a spoon to mix it in, then pour it into slightly buttered pans, in thin sheets. Push the split almonds into the warm candy with the fingers. Marks it before it gets cold for breaking by rolling over it the edge of a thin dinner plate. Sliced cocoanut can be used instead of almonds.
A boiled-sugar sheet candy, close to what English books call almond hardbake. The whole recipe hinges on the sugar stage, so ignore the clock and use a thermometer.
- The stage, not the time"Sets nearly hard so that it can only just be pressed flat" is hard-ball, roughly 250-265F (121-129C). Fifteen to twenty minutes is meaningless across different pans and burners; clip on a candy thermometer and pull the pan the moment you reach the number, since sugar climbs fast at the end.
- A scant pintJust under 2 cups (about 450 ml) of water to 2 lb sugar. The water is all boiled off, so the ratio mainly affects how long the boil takes.
- Gum arabicStill sold as acacia gum, in powder form from baking and confectionery suppliers. It softens the bite and keeps the sheet from shattering into dust. Dissolve it fully in the warm water before the sugar goes in or you will get gritty lumps that never disperse.
- Cream of tartarThe acid inverts a portion of the sucrose so the candy stays glassy rather than turning opaque and sandy. Do not leave it out, and do not double it; too much invert sugar gives a sheet that stays tacky.
- Do not stirTaken literally, and for good reason. Once the syrup boils, a single sugar crystal knocked off the pan wall can seed the whole batch. Wash the sides down once with a wet pastry brush early on, then leave it alone.
- Rose flavouringRose extract sold today can be very concentrated, and the recipe asks only for a slight flavour. Start with 1/4 teaspoon for this quantity; rosewater, which is much weaker, can be used at a teaspoon or two but adds water at the worst moment. The instruction to drop it over the surface and give one or two turns is to avoid agitating the syrup into crystallisation.
- PansRimmed sheet pans, buttered and ideally lined with parchment or a silicone mat, poured about 1/4 inch deep. Work quickly: pushing almonds in with the fingers means working over 250F sugar, so use the back of a buttered spoon instead, or set the nuts in the pan first and pour over them.
- Marking and storingScoring with the edge of a plate while the sheet is still pliable is sound; a buttered bench scraper is easier. Yield is around 3 lb, enough for a large tin. Keep it airtight, as gum arabic and invert sugar both draw damp and the sheet goes sticky within a day in a humid kitchen.
- Coconut version"Sliced cocoanut" means thin slices off a fresh nut, not the sweetened shredded kind, which will scorch and add moisture. Unsweetened coconut chips are the closest current equivalent.
Jessup Whitehead's The American Pastry Cook was written for hotel and restaurant kitchens in the Chicago of the 1880s and 1890s, where the pastry department was expected to turn out cheap confectionery for banquet tables and candy dishes alongside its pies. Sheet candies of this type - boiled sugar poured thin, studded with nuts and scored for breaking - have obvious kin in the British hardbake tradition, though the line of descent is not a documented one, and the rose flavouring points back further still, to a time when rosewater rather than vanilla was the default perfume of European sweets. Gum arabic, tapped from acacia trees and imported through Egypt and the Sudan, was a workaday confectioner's ingredient in this period: it appears throughout nineteenth-century candy manuals as a binder and softener, and in pastilles and lozenges it did the job gelatin does now. The instruction to mark the sheet with the edge of a dinner plate is a good reminder that this was written for a working kitchen, where the tool at hand was whatever was stacked nearby.