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Fruit and Gelatine Candies: Wafers
For children's parties the initial of the first name of each child may be cut out of the thinly rolled candy. With fancy cutters or a model cut from cardboard, birds and animals may be cut out, and used for favors. Assorted Wafers Prepare mixture as for wintergreen wafers, omitting the oil of wintergreen. Substitute the following combinations of color and flavor, dividing the mixture into several portions, and coloring and flavoring each portion differently.
With oil of clove use scarlet color paste With Oil of cinnamon use rose color paste With oil of lime use green color paste With orange extract use orange color paste With lemon extract use yellow color paste With melted chocolate use vanilla extract Finish like Wintergreen Wafers. orange Wafers Peel of 2 oranges 3/4 cup orange juice 1/4 cup water 1 cup sugar 3 tablespoons gelatine 1 teaspoon orange extract Soak orange peel in cold water to cover overnight, then boil one hour, changing the water every fifteen minutes. Drain, and grind the peel to a pulp, then add sugar, half a cup of orange juice, and one fourth cup water, and boil, stirring occasionally to prevent burning, until thick and syrupy. Add gelatine soaked in remaining one fourth cup orange juice, mix well, add orange extract, and drop from tip of teaspoon on to a buttered marble slab or oiled paper. Before wafers have time to stiffen, place a nut meat in center. A small amount of mixture can be combined with finely chopped pecan nut meats and candied cherries, and used as a filling between two wafers. Wafers can be dipped in melted coating chocolate if desired.
Two related sets of instructions: a color-and-flavor chart for a gelatine wafer base given earlier in the chapter, and a self-contained orange peel wafer that stands on its own. A few of the materials were bought at a druggist in 1917 rather than a grocery.
- The base mixture is elsewhere"Assorted Wafers" depends entirely on the wintergreen wafer recipe given elsewhere in the chapter, which presumably supplies the sugar, gelatine and water proportions. Find that one first; on its own this passage is only a flavoring table. The orange wafers below it are complete and can be made as written.
- Flavoring oils are not extractsOil of clove, oil of cinnamon and oil of lime are concentrated essential oils, perhaps thirty times the strength of an extract. Use them a drop at a time from a toothpick, and buy food-grade oils sold for confectionery, not pharmacy or aromatherapy bottles. Orange and lemon extract, by contrast, are alcohol-based and measured in teaspoons.
- Color pastePaste colors tint without thinning the syrup, which is why the recipe calls for them. Liquid supermarket coloring will work in these small quantities but adds water; gel paste on the tip of a skewer is closer to the original intent.
- Gelatine measureThree tablespoons of granulated gelatine is about four standard envelopes, roughly 27-28 g. Period gelatine may have been less consistent in bloom strength than modern powder, so treat the result as firm rather than delicate and hold back a little if you want a softer wafer.
- Why the peel is boiled four timesOvernight soaking plus an hour of boiling with the water changed every fifteen minutes strips the bitterness out of the white pith. Skip the changes and the wafers turn acrid. This is the hinge of the orange recipe.
- Cooking the pulp"Thick and syrupy" means the mass mounds on the spoon and a track drawn through it on the pan bottom holds for a second. Stir often near the end; ground peel and sugar scorch quickly and the burnt note carries through the whole batch.
- Marble and paperA buttered marble slab draws heat out fast and sets the drops in neat rounds. A chilled sheet pan lined with oiled parchment or a silicone mat does the same job. Work quickly, since the nut meat has to go on before a skin forms.
- Yield and keepingThe orange mixture makes a few dozen teaspoon-sized wafers, depending on how far the syrup is reduced. Dry them uncovered for several hours, then layer between waxed paper in a tin; they are best eaten soon, as they tend to grow leathery on standing.
The Candy Cook Book came out of the Boston school-of-cookery tradition, where home candy making was taught as a measured, thermometer-driven branch of cooking rather than a knack. Gelatine wafers of this kind sit between the older boiled-sugar sweets and the jellied Turkish-delight family, and they had the practical virtue of needing no hard-crack stage and no great skill with a sugar thermometer. The orange wafer is a thrift recipe as much as a confection: it turns the peel of two oranges, otherwise waste, into the body of the candy, using the long soak-and-boil treatment that candied peel makers had long used to draw the bitterness from pith. The flavoring oils and color pastes listed for the assorted wafers were druggist's goods in this period, sold in small vials alongside the cake colors; the book names them by their oil-of form because they are oils rather than extracts.