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Horehound Candy
¾ square inch pressed horehound 2 cups boiling water 3 cups sugar 1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar Pour boiling water over horehound which has been separated in pieces; let stand one minute, then strain through double cheese-cloth. Put into a granite kettle with remaining ingredients, and boil until, when tried in cold water, mixture will become brittle. Turn into a buttered pan, cool slightly, then mark in small squares. Small square packages of horehound may be bought for five cents.
A plain boiled-sugar candy flavored with an infusion of horehound, the bitter mint-family herb long sold in pressed blocks by druggists. The whole recipe hinges on cooking the syrup to the hard-crack stage, which the original describes only by the cold-water test.
- The horehound quantityThe printed page gives three-quarters of a square inch of pressed horehound, which is what the text now reads. If you are working from loose dried leaf instead, about 1 oz (roughly a cup, loosely packed) steeped in the 2 cups of boiling water gives a pronounced but not punishing bitterness.
- Pressed horehoundThe dried herb was sold compressed into small blocks, which is why the recipe says to separate it into pieces and why it closes by quoting a five-cent price for small square packages. Loose dried horehound from a herb supplier is the practical modern substitute; the pressed block is no longer easy to find.
- One minute is shortA one-minute steep on a compressed block extracts less than you would expect. With loose leaf, five to ten minutes off the heat gives a fuller infusion, and the double cheesecloth strain still matters — stray leaf fragments turn gritty in the finished candy.
- Granite kettleGraniteware, meaning enameled steel. Any heavy nonreactive saucepan works; choose one considerably taller than the syrup, since it foams up as the water boils off.
- Give the cold-water test a number"Brittle" is the hard-crack stage, 300–310°F on a candy thermometer. Below that the squares go tacky within a day; much above it the sugar starts to caramelize and muddies the herbal flavor.
- Cream of tartarIt inverts part of the sugar so the batch does not seize into a grainy mass. Do not leave it out, and resist stirring once the syrup boils.
- Marking the squaresScore with a buttered knife while the sheet is still warm and pliable — perhaps two or three minutes after pouring. Wait until it is cold and it will shatter along its own lines instead of yours.
- Yield and keepingThree cups of sugar comes to something over a pound of candy, about 60 to 80 small squares. Horehound drops pull moisture from the air; wrap them individually in waxed paper or dust with a little powdered sugar and keep them sealed.
Horehound is Marrubium vulgare, a woolly, intensely bitter member of the mint family that European settlers carried to North America and that promptly naturalized along roadsides. Its long reputation as a cough and chest remedy is what put it in the candy chapter rather than the medicine chest: sugar was the standard vehicle for a bitter herbal extract, and horehound drops sat somewhere between a sweet and a lozenge for most of the nineteenth century. The closing line — that small pressed squares may be bought for five cents — places this firmly in the era when the corner druggist stocked bulk herbs alongside patent remedies, and a housewife boiling her own batch was simply avoiding the markup. Commercial horehound drops are still made, though the flavor has retreated to a niche taste, generally described as somewhere between root beer and bitter menthol.