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French Candies
1 Cup Water 1 Cup Gelatine 4 Cups Honey Melt the gelatine in the water, stirring well. When it has become a soft paste, add the honey, previously warmed, stirring rapidly. Take from the fire, add the desired flavor and color, mix carefully, and pour into a shallow greased dish.
Let it dry for a few days.
A honey pastille rather than a boiled sugar candy: no thermometer, no crystallisation, just gelatine set soft and left to dry. The measurements are loose even by 1900 standards, so read the notes before you scale anything.
- "1 cup gelatine" is genuinely ambiguousA cup of granulated gelatine is roughly 5 oz, an enormous amount against a single cup of water and would set to rubber. The writer may have meant sheet gelatine loosely packed, or a cup of gelatine already softened in the water; there is no way to tell from the text. Start with about 3 tablespoons (roughly 3 quarter-ounce envelopes) of powdered gelatine to the cup of water and judge from there.
- Bloom before you heatSprinkle the gelatine over cold water and let it stand ten minutes until it swells, then warm it gently. Dumping powder into hot water gives you lumps that never dissolve, and the "soft paste" the recipe describes is exactly the bloomed state.
- Keep the honey off the boilWarm the honey to no more than about 120F. Gelatine loses setting strength above roughly 175F, and hot honey darkens and turns bitter. "Take from the fire" should happen the moment the two are combined and smooth.
- Flavour and colour lastExtracts flash off in heat, so add them once the pan is off the stove, as written. Rose, orange-flower and lemon were among the period choices; a teaspoon of extract to this quantity is plenty.
- The dishThe batch runs to roughly five cups, so half an inch deep needs something nearer a 9-by-13 pan; an 8-inch square would give a slab over an inch thick. Grease lightly with a flavourless oil, or line with plastic and dust with cornflour and icing sugar, along the lines of the starch dusting still used commercially.
- "Let it dry for a few days"This is the hinge. The candy is not finished when it sets; it needs two to four days uncovered at cool room temperature to firm up and lose surface moisture. Refrigeration makes it weep instead. Cut into squares with an oiled knife and roll each in cornflour and icing sugar to stop them fusing.
- Yield and keepingYield depends entirely on how thick you pour and how small you cut; the batch is around five cups before drying. Stored between layers of waxed paper in a tin they keep two or three weeks; honey is hygroscopic, so they will turn sticky in a humid kitchen.
Despite the name, this belongs to the family of gum and jelly pastilles that French confectioners called pâtes, a related family to the Turkish delight that English cooks knew after the Ottoman lokum reached Western tables in the nineteenth century. The traditional versions were thickened with gum arabic or with starch; gelatine, cheap and reliable once it was sold in packeted sheets and granules in the later 1800s, put the same confection within reach of a home cook with no sugar thermometer and no copper pan. Honey in place of boiled sugar syrup makes it a distinctly domestic shortcut: a sweet that could be made in one pan, needed no candy-making judgement, and would sit in a tin looking like something bought.