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Peppermints
1 1/2 cups sugar. ½ cup boiling water 6 drops oil peppermint Put sugar and water into a granite saucepan and stir until sugar is dissolved. Boil ten minutes; remove from fire, add peppermint, and beat until of right consistency. Drop from tip of spoon on slightly buttered paper.
A fondant-style patty made by boiling syrup, then beating it until it grains. The whole thing turns on the beating stage rather than the ingredients.
- The sugar quantity is missingThis text gives the water and the flavouring but not the sugar, which is absent from the printing as it stands. Fondant syrups of the period are commonly in the region of two parts sugar to one part water by volume, which would suggest something like 3 cups sugar to the 1½ cups boiling water here, but treat that as a reconstruction, not the book's figure.
- Granite saucepan"Granite" or graniteware is enamelled steel or iron; it would have been an obvious choice for sugar work, where reactive unlined metal is best avoided. Any heavy non-reactive pan works; a light pan scorches the syrup at the end of the boil.
- Ten minutes means a temperatureThe book gives only a time, but a boil of this length is likely to bring the syrup somewhere around soft-ball stage (about 238F). A thermometer is more reliable than the clock, since pan width and heat output change the timing entirely.
- Stop stirring once it boilsStir only until the sugar dissolves, as directed. Stirring a boiling syrup, or leaving crystals clinging to the pan sides, seeds coarse graining and gives gritty patties instead of a smooth cream.
- Oil of peppermint is not extractOil of peppermint is the undiluted essential oil, several times stronger than the alcohol-based extract sold as flavouring. Six drops of oil is correct; six drops of extract will taste of almost nothing, and a teaspoon of oil would be inedible.
- Cool before flavouringFlavouring off the heat -- The recipe adds the peppermint after the pan leaves the fire. Letting the syrup stand a moment first will preserve more of the volatile oil, some of which is driven off if it meets syrup at full heat.
- Beating to "right consistency"Beat until the clear syrup turns opaque and pale and thickens to the point where it just holds a mound. Drop the patties as soon as that happens; the mass stiffens quickly in the pan and then has to be softened again with a spoonful of water.
- Paper and yieldButtered parchment or a silicone mat replaces the buttered paper. The yield cannot be stated with the sugar quantity missing from the text. Leave the patties uncovered for a few hours to firm, and keep them dry, as fondant softens in humid air.
Peppermint patties of this kind belong to the great age of home confectionery, when boiled sugar work was a standard domestic accomplishment rather than a specialist trade. Household manuals of the period treated fondant as a base technique: one syrup, beaten to grain, then flavoured and coloured to make peppermints, wintergreen creams, or centres for dipped chocolates. The reliance on oil of peppermint, bought by the ounce from a druggist rather than a grocer, is characteristic of the period, when flavouring oils and essences sat squarely in the pharmacist's stock. Peppermint itself had long been sold as a digestive, and the line between a confection and a lozenge taken after dinner was a thin one.