Peppermint Drops (Pound and sift four ounces)

A sugar-and-egg-white lozenge of the kind that sat on the boundary between the confectioner's shop and the chemist's. Two things in it are out of step with current practice: the uncooked egg white and the sheer quantity of peppermint oil.

• Raw egg white, never heatedThe whites are beaten into sugar and the drops are merely air-dried away from the fire, so nothing in the sweet ever reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Drying concentrates the sugar but does not sterilise, and these keep for weeks in a tin, which is time for any contamination to matter. If you want peppermint drops, work from a current recipe written around pasteurised whites or a cooked syrup.
• Sixty drops of oil of peppermintThat is roughly three-quarters of a teaspoon of true essential oil, not the diluted alcoholic extract sold in supermarket baking aisles. Peppermint oil at that strength is a potent substance in its own right; the two are not interchangeable measure for measure, and substituting extract drop for drop would give a barely flavoured sweet while using oil as written gives something medicinal.
• "Double-refined sugar"The whitest, purest loaf sugar available in the period, bought as a cone and broken up at home. Pounding and sifting it produced what we would call icing or confectioners' sugar, though without the cornflour anti-caking agent that modern icing sugar contains.
• The proportions look thinFour ounces of sugar to two whole whites is far wetter than a modern royal-icing mixture, which runs nearer eight or nine ounces of sugar to a single white. At that ratio the paste is likely to spread on the paper rather than hold a domed drop; more sugar, or less white, would be needed to get a drop that keeps its shape.
• "As above" and "at a distance from the fire"The dropping method is carried over from the preceding entry in the original book, and the drying instruction means gentle ambient warmth — an airing cupboard or a cooling range, not oven heat. Direct heat would colour the sugar and drive off the volatile peppermint.