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Crystallized Fruits
FRUITS, flowers, and leaves are preserved by means of sugar cooked to the crystal or the soft ball stage. When permeated by syrup they may be kept for a long time. A few recipes are given, and others may be easily formulated with different fruits and petals.
Crystallized Mint Leaves Wipe fresh mint leaves, remove from stems, and brush each leaf with white of egg, beaten until stiff. Dip in one third cup granulated sugar flavored with five drops oil of spearmint. Place closely together on a cake rack covered with wax paper, and let stand in a slow oven until dry. If the leaves are not thoroughly coated, the process may be repeated.
Crystallized Rose Petals Remove fresh rose petals from stem, coat each one with white of egg slightly beaten, dip in granulated sugar, and place on a plate sprinkled with sugar. Sift sugar lightly over petals, and place in warm room near stove until dry. If petals are not thoroughly coated, the process may be repeated. Crystallized Pears Take seckel or Bartlett pears which have not begun to ripen, and pare them, leaving the stems on. Prick in several places, cover with cold water, and add a crystal of burnt alum for each two pears. Bring to boiling point, and cook gently until they are tender, being careful that they do not go to pieces. Put pears in cold water, changing it several times until pears look clear. Make syrup by boiling two cups sugar and one cup water five minutes, then cool.
Three separate procedures sit under one heading here, and each has a problem a modern cook has to reckon with before starting. The first two rely on raw egg white that is never brought to a safe temperature; the third is cut off before it finishes and calls for a firming agent no longer used in domestic cooking.
- The raw egg white is the hingeBoth the mint leaves and the rose petals are coated in beaten white of egg and then simply dried near a stove or in a slow oven whose temperature is never specified. Drying is not pasteurizing: the egg protein sets and holds the sugar, but nothing in the process reliably reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Modern recipes for crystallizing flowers generally call for pasteurized egg white or reconstituted egg-white powder.
- Burnt alumAlum was the standard nineteenth-century firming agent for fruit that had to hold its shape through long candying. It is potassium aluminium sulphate, dried ("burnt") to drive off its water. It has largely left the domestic kitchen, the quantity here is given as "a crystal" with no weight at all, and there is no way to know from the text what dose the pears absorb.
- The pear recipe is incompleteThe text stops after "Make syrup by boiling two cups sugar and one cup water five minutes, then cool." The stages that would finish a candied pear -- repeated reheating of the syrup, the gradual increase in sugar density, the final drying -- are not on the page. There is nothing here to follow through to a finished pear.
- Oil of spearmintFive drops of a distilled essential oil, not extract. Spearmint oil is still sold, but food-grade and aromatherapy grades are not interchangeable, and the oils of this period were not standardized the way a modern flavouring oil is.
- Roses and mintThe book assumes garden material. Florist roses are routinely treated with systemic pesticides and fungicides not approved for food crops, and nothing in the recipe removes them.
- "Crystal or the soft ball stage"Soft ball is usually given as roughly 234-240F. What the book means by "crystal" is less clear; it appears to indicate a syrup taken to the point where it will grain out on cooling. Neither stage is called for in the three recipes that follow: the leaves and petals crystallize by drying, and the pear syrup as given is only boiled five minutes.
The Candy Cook Book comes out of the Boston Cooking School circle that carried domestic-science method into confectionery, and this chapter is the oldest kind of sweetmeat in the book. Crystallizing petals and leaves in sugar goes back to the European apothecary tradition, where candied violets, roses and borage flowers were sold as much for their supposed cordial virtues as for pleasure; by the seventeenth century sugared rose petals were a standard item in English stillroom manuscripts, and Toulouse built a small industry on candied violets that survives today. The pear recipe belongs to a different tradition -- the slow, multi-day candying of whole fruit in syrups of rising strength, the technique behind Provencal fruits confits and Italian mostarda. The seckel pear called for is a small, firm American variety, well suited to holding its shape, and the burnt alum was the period's answer to the same problem: keeping fruit from collapsing during a long, hot soak. Alum appears constantly in nineteenth-century preserving and pickling books, usually with no measurement more precise than "a lump" or "a crystal."