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Candy Ornaments
A marble slab or marble top table is needed to form pane's, windows, and the like, of clear candy, on. Slightly oil the slab. Take a cornet filled with icing and form the outline frame of a church window, for example, and into the rim so made pour clear colored candy. Six or eight keystone shaped panels made the same way may be set up and joined together by the edges to form a basket, which in turn may be filled with macaroons.
The rim to hold the candy in shape on the slab may be made of dough oiled over, or of putty when large sheets of candy are needed to build up large ornamental pieces.
This is a construction method rather than a formula: the assumption is that you already have a batch of sugar boiled to the hard-crack stage and a bag of royal icing to hand. Most of it translates directly to a modern bench, with one exception that cannot be carried over.
- The putty is the problemGlaziers' putty of this era was whiting bound with linseed oil, and white lead was sometimes added. Hot poured sugar sits directly against that dam for as long as it takes to set, and the finished panel is presented as food. Nothing about that contact is acceptable now, and the recipe as printed offers putty as the method for large sheets.
- The dough dam has its own issueThe alternative rim is raw oiled dough acting as a mould for hot sugar; the recipe specifies no temperature. It can be expected to scorch at the contact line and shed crumb into the edge of the panel. It is not a poisoning risk, but it is not a clean release either.
- CornetA rolled paper piping cone, snipped at the tip. Filled here with icing, presumably royal, which sets hard enough to hold the poured sugar in place.
- Clear candyPresumably sugar boiled to the hard-crack stage, around 300-310F, coloured and poured while fluid. The recipe assumes the reader knows the stage and gives no thermometer instruction.
- The marble slabMarble is specified because it draws heat out of the sugar quickly and evenly. A cold steel bench does the same. Both need the lightest possible film of neutral oil, wiped rather than poured, or the set surface goes cloudy.
- Joining the panelsThe recipe says only that the keystone panels are joined at the edges; the usual method is to touch each edge briefly to a warm metal surface and press them together. The joint sets fast, so dry-fitting the whole basket first is sensible.
- MacaroonsIn this period, almond macaroons, made from ground almonds, sugar and egg white. Not the French sandwich cookie, which the word did not yet mean in American usage.
- If you want to build sugar panelsWork from a current confectionery reference with food-grade moulding materials. Isomalt and silicone forms have largely displaced this method in the trade.
Poured sugar work of this kind belonged to the pastry cook's display trade rather than to dessert as such: hotel and restaurant kitchens of the later nineteenth century were expected to produce a centrepiece for the buffet, and clear coloured sugar imitating stained glass was among the standard effects, along with nougat baskets and spun sugar. The church window is a telling choice of subject, since such pieces were meant to be admired down the length of a table and only incidentally eaten. What dates the entry most sharply is the casual reach for putty: a building material offered without comment for a food-contact use, something later food-safety regulation and the retreat from lead pigments closed off.