Fig Paste
3 pints of water. 1 1/2 pounds of sugar. 3 ounces of corn starch. Juice of half a lemon. 6 ounce of glucose.
Boil sugar and water together and thicken with the starch same as in making a thickened pudding sauce, then put in the glucose and lemon juice and cook at the side of the range about 15 minutes. Color a portion of it pink. When nearly cold mould it into any form and roll in powdered sugar. The above compound is the cheap gum drop of the street vendors.
A confectioner's starch jelly, not a fig preserve — there is no fruit in it at all. The name describes the texture and the trade use, and the last line tells you frankly what it was for.
- The hinge: cook it down, not just for the clockThree pints of water thickened with only 3 oz of cornstarch gives a slack pudding, not something you can mould and roll in sugar. The 15 minutes "at the side of the range" is a gentle reduction over low heat; expect to hold it there considerably longer, until the mass is thick enough to mound on a spoon and pull away from the pan side.
- "At the side of the range"On a coal or wood range the cooler edge of the top was the low-heat zone. Read it as the lowest setting that keeps a lazy bubble going, with frequent stirring — starch pastes scorch on the bottom the moment they stop moving.
- GlucoseNineteenth-century confectioners' glucose is corn syrup. Six ounces by weight is roughly half a cup. Its job is to stop the sucrose crystallising; without it the finished paste is liable to turn grainy.
- Cornstarch weightThree ounces is a scant two-thirds cup measured. Weigh it if you can — starch measured by volume varies noticeably depending on how it is scooped.
- Setting and mouldingRather than moulding while warm, pour the cooked paste into an oiled shallow tray to a depth of half an inch, let it set overnight, then cut into squares or rounds and toss in powdered sugar. Genuine gum drops were dropped into trays of dry cornstarch impressions and left a day or more to firm.
- The pink portionDivide the hot paste, tint one half, and pour the two side by side or in layers. Period colouring was often coal-tar dye of uncertain composition; use modern food colouring.
- FlavourHalf a lemon's juice is all the flavouring given, and in this quantity of syrup it reads as barely tart. Plan on flavouring the batch if you want more than sweetness.
- YieldDepending on how far you reduce it, something in the region of two pounds of finished paste, enough for several dozen small cut pieces. Store them in a tin with more powdered sugar; they weep if left open to humid air.
"Fig paste" here is a confectioner's trade name rather than a fruit preserve, and this book says so outright by calling the result "the cheap gum drop of the street vendors." Cheapness is the point: glucose syrup from corn became abundant and inexpensive in the United States after wet-milling scaled up in the last third of the nineteenth century, and it let candy makers replace part of their sugar with something cheaper that also suppressed crystallisation. Starch jellies of this kind were at the bottom of the confectionery market, and this recipe is a reminder that a nineteenth-century fruit name on a sweet frequently meant a shape, a colour or a texture rather than the fruit.