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Walnut Creams
1 pound fine icing sugar. 2 heaping teaspoonfuls powdered gum arabic. 5 tablespoonfuls water. 3 dozen walnut kernels. 1 teaspoonful extract vanilla. Put a little sugar in the water to make a syrup, and the gum in it, stir over the fire until the gum is dissolved. Take it off and work in the powdered sugar gradually with a wooden paddle. Add the vanilla. The more it is stirred and beaten with the paddle the whiter and finer the candy becomes. At last turn out the lump on to the table--it is like soft white dough--and roll it in one long roll, cut off slices, stick a half of a walnut kernel in each piece and pinch the paste up to hold it, by shaping it in the hollow of the left hand. Lay the finished creams on a tray to dry. This makes about 6 dozen. The sugar is not boiled, only the hot gnm syrup is used.
An uncooked fondant — the only heat is in dissolving the gum arabic — so the whole thing hinges on getting a stiff, workable paste rather than a sticky one.
- The hinge: no boilingThe recipe repeats it at the end for good reason. Nothing here reaches the soft-ball stage; the body of the candy comes from gum arabic and beaten sugar, not from cooked syrup. If you boil the syrup you get a different sweet entirely, and the paste will crust rather than stay pliable.
- Icing sugarConfectioners' or powdered sugar. Modern brands usually carry up to about 3 percent cornstarch, which absorbs a little more moisture than the pure pulverised sugar of the period, so you may need slightly less than the full pound or a few extra drops of water. Sift it.
- Gum arabicSold as powdered gum arabic or gum acacia, in the baking or cake-decorating aisle and from spice merchants. Buy food grade. Two heaping teaspoons is roughly 8-10 g. It dissolves slowly and grudgingly; keep the heat low and stir until the syrup is clear with no gritty specks, then take it off.
- "5 tablespoonfuls water"About 75 ml at the modern 15 ml spoon. Period tablespoon measures were not standardised and may have differed from that, so treat this as a starting point and hold back the last spoonful until you see how the sugar takes it.
- The beatingThe instruction that the paste grows whiter the longer it is worked is literal; you are working air into it. Ten minutes with a stiff wooden spoon or bench scraper makes a visible difference. A stand mixer with the paddle does the same job.
- WalnutsThree dozen kernels split into halves gives 72 halves, matching the six dozen pieces the yield implies and the recipe's 'a half of a walnut kernel in each piece.' Toasting them briefly at 350F sharpens the flavour against all that sugar, though the original does not ask for it.
- Drying and yieldAbout six dozen small creams. Leave them uncovered on a tray for 12 to 24 hours in a dry room until the surface is firm and no longer tacky, then store airtight between layers of parchment. In humid weather they will stay soft for days.
Gum paste creams like these belong to the era before every confectioner had a reliable candy thermometer. Boiled fondant demands precise temperature control; gum arabic, the dried sap of acacia trees and long a staple of both the apothecary and the sugar trade, let a cook bind powdered sugar into a plastic, workable dough with nothing but a warm syrup and a strong arm. The same paste was rolled for peppermint creams, tinted for bonbons and moulded into flowers for cake work. Walnut creams — a lozenge of fondant pinched around a nut half — were a fixture of American home candy-making through the late nineteenth century.