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Orange-Flower Bonbons in Cases
Put twelve ounces of loaf sugar into a sugar-boiler, and boil to 38 degrees. When it is cool, grain it with a spatula until it is perfectly white, then add one ounce of candied orange-flowers, working them well in, fill some paper-cases with the mixture, and put them in the hot closet to dry; they are then ready for use.
This is a French-style fondant, made by boiling syrup, cooling it, and working it until it grains white. The only difficult parts are the degrees and the flowers.
- "Boil to 38 degrees" is a hydrometer reading"Boil to 38 degrees" is most likely a hydrometer reading -- 38 degrees Baume, taken with a pese-sirop floated in the syrup, rather than a temperature. It would indicate a heavy syrup rather than a hard-crack stage. Because such a reading depends on the temperature at which it is taken, no single Fahrenheit equivalent is honest here; modern fondant of this type is normally boiled to the soft-ball range, but the original is genuinely ambiguous.
- Loaf sugarSugar sold in hard cones or loaves, broken up and crushed before use. It was simply well-refined cane sugar; ordinary granulated is the direct substitute, with 12 oz being about 1¾ cups.
- The sugar-boilerAn unlined copper pan with a pouring lip and no tinning, kept exclusively for sugar. Any heavy-bottomed saucepan works, but it must be scrupulously clean and free of grease or the batch will not grain evenly.
- Graining is the hingeThe syrup must be cooled substantially before it is worked. Stirring or scraping while hot produces coarse, gritty crystals; letting it drop to lukewarm and then working it with a spatula gives the fine, opaque white paste the recipe is after. Any stray crystal on the pan side during boiling will seed it early and ruin the texture.
- Candied orange-flowersWhole orange blossoms, typically from bitter orange varieties, preserved in sugar. They are still made in parts of southern France and Sicily but are a specialty import. Orange-flower water is not a substitute for the pieces themselves -- it adds the perfume but none of the texture, and its water content will slacken the fondant.
- The hot closetA warming cupboard beside the range, kept gently warm rather than hot. A turned-off oven with only the light on, or a dehydrator at its lowest setting, does the same job: the point is to dry the surface, not to bake.
- Paper casesSmall fluted paper cups of the petit-four or mini-muffin sort. Twelve ounces of sugar will fill somewhere between two and three dozen of them, depending on size.
- KeepingOnce dried, store airtight and away from damp. Fondant reabsorbs moisture readily and the bonbons will go sticky and weep within a day or two in a humid kitchen.
Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896 while he was maître d'hôtel at the Waldorf, drew heavily on the French professional repertoire that governed American hotel kitchens of the period, and the confectionery chapters in particular read as translations of French practice. Candied orange blossom belongs to the Mediterranean citrus belt, where the bitter orange was grown as much for its flowers and their distilled water as for its fruit; Provence and Sicily both had established trades in preserving the petals in sugar. A bonbon of this kind was probably not dessert so much as part of the array of small sweets often said to have been sent out with coffee, where the hotel's kitchen was expected to show that it could do in-house what a good confiseur did in a shop.