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Wintergreen Creams
Melt a portion of fondant in the upper part of a double boiler until it is soft enough to drop from a spoon. It may be necessary to add a few drops of hot water. Color it with red vegetable coloring to a delicate pink. Flavor with oil of wintergreen. Stir until it is creamy. Drop from a teaspoon on oiled paper.
The fondant work here is straightforward; the flavoring is not. The instruction "flavor with oil of wintergreen" gives no quantity, and oil of wintergreen is not an ordinary kitchen ingredient.
- Oil of wintergreen is methyl salicylateThe essential oil distilled from wintergreen leaves (or its synthetic equivalent) is roughly 98 percent methyl salicylate, a salicylate closely related to aspirin. A single teaspoon is equivalent in salicylate content to a large handful of adult aspirin tablets, and it is absorbed readily. Bottles sold today carry external-use-only warnings for exactly this reason.
- No quantity is givenThe recipe says only "flavor with," leaving the amount to the cook's judgement. With a substance whose safe culinary use is measured in single drops per batch and whose toxic dose is measured in teaspoons, an unspecified quantity is the failure point. Nothing in the method dilutes or drives off what goes in.
- Candy is the wrong vehicleThese are uncooked fondant drops, made small, sweet and pink, and likely to be eaten more than one at a time. Concentration is not diluted by cooking or by portion size.
- Modern flavorings are not the same thingA bottle labelled wintergreen extract or wintergreen flavoring in a supermarket is heavily diluted and dosed for teaspoon measures. It is not interchangeable with what a druggist of this period sold as oil of wintergreen, and the two are still easily confused on a shelf.
- Coloring"Red vegetable coloring" in this period meant a dye of plant origin, distinguished from the mineral and coal-tar colors that had drawn regulatory attention after the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act. Modern liquid food color behaves similarly, a drop or two into warm fondant.
- If you want wintergreen creamsUse a current recipe with a named, measured, food-grade flavoring. The fondant technique below it is sound; the dosing is what the original leaves out.
Wintergreen was one of the defining American candy flavors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drawn from Gaultheria procumbens, the low creeping shrub of eastern woodlands whose leaves and berries were chewed long before they were distilled. By the time this book appeared, the oil was a druggist's staple sold alongside peppermint and clove, used in liniments as often as in confectionery, and the same bottle might serve both purposes in a household. Fondant creams like these belonged to the vogue for home candy-making that ran through American domestic manuals of the period: a single batch of boiled fondant was kept on hand, then divided, tinted and flavored to yield a whole box of assorted centers with no further cooking. That the book expects its reader to keep oil of wintergreen in the pantry, and to judge the dose by eye, says a good deal about how loosely the line between the medicine shelf and the flavoring shelf was drawn.