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Sugared Flowers
Boil some sugar to the crack degree. If, when a fork is dipped into the pan, it throws off the sugar as fine as threads when taken out, it is ready, and the flowers may be put in. Rub the inside of some teacups with salad-oil, and put into each cup four tablespoonfuls of the flowers and sugar; let them stand until cold, turn them out, and serve piled one on top of the other. Preserves, Jams, Etc
A short entry that assumes a cook who already knows sugar work. Two things carry it: the sugar has to reach the right stage, and the flowers have to be dry and edible.
- "The crack degree"In nineteenth-century sugar-boiling this is generally the hard crack, usually given as roughly 300-310F on a thermometer. The fork test described is a rough guide only, and a thermometer removes the guesswork; sugar boiled short of that stage will stay tacky and will not turn cleanly out of the cup.
- Quantities are not givenQuantities are only partly given -- no weight of sugar and no volume of flowers, though the recipe does specify four tablespoonfuls of the flowers and sugar per teacup. Something in the range of a pound of sugar with a scant half cup of water is a workable batch, enough to fill several cups.
- Salad-oilA table oil of the sort kept for dressing salads, in this period usually olive oil; used here purely as a mould release. Wipe the cups with the thinnest possible film; a puddle in the bottom will sit on the finished piece.
- Which flowersThe recipe never says, and the choice is left to the cook. Many garden flowers are not edible and florist stock is routinely sprayed, so use only unsprayed blooms you can identify with certainty.
- Flowers must be bone dryThis is the hinge. Any water clinging to petals will make sugar at 300F spit violently and can seize the whole pan. Pick dry, blot, and let the petals air for an hour before they go anywhere near the syrup.
- Keeping the sugar clearA pinch of cream of tartar or a spoonful of glucose added early guards against the batch graining as you stir the flowers in. Do not stir the syrup once it is boiling; wash any crystals down the pan side with a wet brush.
- Work fast, off the heatSugar at the crack stage stiffens within a minute or two. Pull the pan, fold the flowers through, and fill the oiled cups immediately, one after another, rather than measuring carefully.
- ServingTurned out, each cupful is a domed cake of sugar and petals; the instruction to pile them one on top of the other makes a small pyramid for a dessert table. They keep for weeks in a tin with a tight lid but go sticky in humid air within hours.
Sugared and candied flowers are one of the oldest branches of European confectionery, running from the Elizabethan banqueting course through eighteenth-century still-room books and on into the professional kitchens of Oscar Tschirky's day, when candied violets from Toulouse and crystallised rose petals were standard stock for garnishing ices, petits fours and cakes. The technique here is not the modern egg-white-and-caster-sugar crystallising: the flowers are bound into set sugar at the hard crack, producing a solid sweet rather than a decorated petal. Its placement in the preserves chapter is telling. In a hotel kitchen the boiled-sugar stages were the shared foundation of jams, jellies, glazed fruit and sweets alike, and the crack could be recognised by the thread thrown from a fork.