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Fruit Drops of Lemon Juice
1153. Mix a quantity of lemon juice with sifted sugar, nearly thick enough for a spoon to stand upright in. Put it in a deep pan and make it quite hot on the fire, stirring it all the time, but do not let it come to a boil, then mix in a small quantity more sugar. Warm it, then chalk the spout of the pan, and with a small stick drop it on tin or pewter plates in small drops. When cold, take them off the plates, and put them in the stove or sieves to dry.
GINGER DROPS (a good Stomachic). 1154. Beat two ounces of fresh candied orange in a mortar with a little sugar, to a paste; then mix one ounce of powder of white ginger with one pound of loaf sugar. Wet the sugar with a little water, and boil altogether to a candy, and drop it on paper, as for lemon drops.
Two old-fashioned sugar drops: an uncooked lemon paste dried slowly, and a boiled ginger candy. The lemon version is the more delicate, and the temperature limit is the whole of it.
- Do not let the lemon mixture boilThe lemon drops are essentially a fondant-like paste of sifted sugar and juice, warmed only enough to loosen it for dropping. The recipe gives no temperature, only "quite hot" and short of boiling; take it past a simmer and the sugar dissolves fully and you get a syrup that will never set into an opaque drop.
- "Sifted sugar"This means finely powdered sugar sifted free of lumps, i.e. modern icing/confectioners' sugar. Granulated will not give the smooth, quick-drying paste the method depends on.
- How thick is "nearly thick enough for a spoon to stand upright"Aim for a stiff paste, close to the recipe's own test, that falls from a stick in a reluctant blob rather than a ribbon. Something in the region of four parts icing sugar to one part juice by weight is a starting point only; lemons vary too much for a fixed figure.
- Chalking the spoutRubbing chalk on the lip stops the syrup from creeping back down the outside of the pan, so each drop breaks off cleanly. A small piping bag or a warmed teaspoon does the same job without chalk on the cookware.
- Tin or pewter platesAny cold, smooth, non-absorbent surface works, and a chilled metal baking sheet is closest in spirit. Avoid antique pewter for food: older alloys frequently contain lead. Parchment or a silicone mat releases better than either.
- "Put them in the stove or sieves to dry"The stove here is a warm drying cupboard, not a hot oven. An oven at its lowest setting with the door ajar, around 120-150F, or simply a day at room temperature on a wire rack, will firm them without colouring.
- "Boil altogether to a candy" for the ginger dropsThe book gives no thermometer reading. In period confectionery "candy" refers to the stage at which boiled sugar grains and sets, rather than to a fixed temperature; boil it far enough that the drops set firm rather than tacky.
- Candied orange and ginger quantitiesTwo ounces of candied peel pounded with one ounce of ground ginger to a pound of sugar makes a sharply gingery sweet by modern taste. Halving the ginger gives something closer to a contemporary ginger candy.
- YieldStorage -- Keep them airtight with a little icing sugar between the layers; both types pick up moisture from the air readily.
Small sugar drops flavoured with citrus and spice were a staple of the nineteenth-century confectioner and of the ambitious home stillroom, and they sit in this book among a long run of preserves, candies and comfits made when sugar had become cheap enough for domestic sweet-making. The description of ginger drops as "a good Stomachic" is not a stray flourish: ginger had a long-standing reputation as a digestive, and sweets of this kind occupied a comfortable middle ground between the confectioner's counter and the medicine chest, taken after dinner much as a modern cook might reach for a peppermint. Chalking the spout and dropping from a stick belong to the same tradition of hand-work later displaced by moulded drops and drop-roller machinery, which is why the lemon drops sold today are boiled hard candies rather than the soft, slowly dried sugar paste described here.