Home › Recipes › Flavoring (Dissolve the powdered gum)
Flavoring (Dissolve the powdered gum)
Dissolve the powdered gum in the water made warm for the purpose. Then add to the gum-water the sugar and cream of tartar and set on to boil. Do not stir the syrup after it is once well mixed. It should boil about 15 minutes. Then try it by dropping a little in cold water. When the lump retains its shape pretty well and can be worked between the fingers like gum paste it is ready. Pour it into the shallow plaster of paris molds, either oiled or weed to make doll figures, or figures of animals, fishes, etc, etc. This, if cast without being stirred, makes clear candy, but to have it white and opaque stir the candy in the kettle giving it only from 10 to 20 turns with a spoon, before pouring it out. The flavoring oil may be added while stirring. Should the candy set in the kettle add water and make it hot again, with care that the candy does not immediately begin to burn to caramel.
This is a molded gum-sugar candy in the clear-toy tradition, and the page assumes you already have the ingredient quantities from the recipe above it in the book. The instructions themselves are complete enough to work from, provided you supply proportions and a thermometer.
- The missing ingredient list"The powdered gum," "the sugar" and "the cream of tartar" all refer back to quantities given elsewhere in the book. The gum is most likely gum arabic (acacia), though gum tragacanth was also used in confectionery of the period. No proportions can be recovered from this page.
- The hinge: stir or do not stirEverything about the finished candy turns on agitation. Left alone, the syrup sets clear and glassy; the ten to twenty turns of the spoon in the kettle that the recipe calls for seed crystallization and turn it white and opaque. Once you have started stirring you cannot go back, and stirring too long grains the whole batch.
- Read the cold-water test as a temperatureRead the cold-water test -- "Retains its shape pretty well and can be worked between the fingers" describes a lump still pliable rather than brittle, which points to the ball stages rather than the crack stages. No exact temperature can be fixed from the wording; the original worked by the cold-water test alone.
- Why cream of tartar is thereIt is not a leavener here. The acid inverts part of the sucrose during the fifteen-minute boil, which is what keeps the clear version from crystallizing on its own. Too much and the candy will never set firm; too little and it clouds in the mold.
- Plaster of paris moldsAntique clear-toy molds are cast plaster or, more often, tinned metal. Modern hardware-store plaster is not made for food contact and may carry additives and release agents. Use metal chocolate molds or high-temperature silicone, both of which take 300F syrup without trouble.
- "Oiled or weed"A typesetting error for "waxed" or "wet" -- the point is that the mold surface must be prepared so the candy releases. Light neutral oil applied thinly with a brush works; a heavy coat will fog the surface of a clear candy.
- Flavoring oilsThese are the confectioner's essential oils -- peppermint, wintergreen, lemon, clove -- not extracts. They are several times the strength of an alcohol extract, so measure in drops, and add them off the heat or during the brief stir, since they flash off at boiling temperature.
- Reheating a set kettleThe warning at the end is real. Adding water to seized candy and reheating means driving off that water again while the sugar is already near caramel point; the batch scorches quickly and takes on a bitter edge. Work in small batches and pour fast rather than salvaging.
Molded transparent sugar figures of this kind are what American confectioners called clear toy candy, and they were a Christmas fixture in Pennsylvania and the mid-Atlantic through the nineteenth century, sold as animals, ships, locomotives and dolls cast in carved metal molds. The gum arabic here is the older confectioner's trick: dissolved in water it gives the syrup body and a slight chew, and it is the same gum behind gum drops and the pastilles sold in apothecary shops. The recipe's assumption that a working pastry cook owns shallow plaster molds and a stock of flavoring oils places it squarely in the trade literature rather than the home kitchen -- The American Pastry Cook was written for men earning a living at the bench, which is why it can leave the quantities on the previous page and simply get on with technique.