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Vanilla Candy Tablets
Put one pound of loaf sugar into a sugar-boiler with just enough water to dissolve it. Boil the sugar to the ball degree, then pour in a few drops of acetic acid and flavor with essence of vanilla. Work the sugar against the sides of the pan with a silver spoon, using the back part of the bowl, thus giving it an opalized appearance. When through working the sugar, pour it into a tin dish, leaving it until it is nearly set, then mark the tablets out with the back of a knife on the surface of the sugar. Before the sugar is poured in, the tin should be lightly brushed over with the oil of almonds. Dry the sugar in the screen, and when it is hard, snap it in two where it is marked.
A grained sugar confection of the sort a hotel pastry department turned out by the tray. Nearly everything hangs on the temperature and on how vigorously the syrup is worked afterward.
- The hinge: working the syrupThe opalescent, opaque look comes from forcing the syrup to crystallize in very fine grain by rubbing it against the pan. Worked too hot it grains coarse and gritty; worked too cold it stiffens before it can be worked at all. The recipe gives no resting or cooling step and names no temperature for the rubbing.
- "Ball degree"Soft-ball stage, roughly 238-240F on a thermometer. Period confectioners generally judged it by dropping syrup into cold water and pinching it into a ball that holds its shape but flattens between the fingers; the recipe itself names no test.
- Loaf sugarCane sugar sold in cut-up cones, prized because it was cleaner than the grocer's brown or granulated. Ordinary granulated sugar is the same thing now; one pound with about 1/2 cup water dissolves without scorching.
- Sugar-boiler and silver spoonAn unlined copper pan with a pouring lip. Any heavy-bottomed saucepan works. Silver was presumably chosen because it would not taint or discolor the sugar, though the recipe does not say so; a stainless or wooden spoon does the same job.
- Acetic acidA few drops of acid invert part of the sucrose and help keep the crystals fine. Distilled white vinegar is the practical substitute, though at about 5 per cent it is far weaker than the acid intended here, so any quantity given is approximate; do not use industrial or glacial acetic acid.
- Oil of almondsThis means sweet almond oil, used only to grease the tin. Bitter almond oil is a different product and not something to put in the pan. Any neutral oil serves.
- The tin and the screenPour into a lightly oiled 8-inch square pan for tablets about 1/4 inch thick. "Drying in the screen" meant a wire rack in a warm, dry cupboard; a few hours at room temperature in low humidity does it.
- YieldA pound of sugar gives roughly 24 to 30 small tablets, depending on how you score them. Mark the divisions while the slab is still soft or it will shatter irregularly.
Sugar tablets like these sat at the plainest end of the confectioner's repertoire: boiled sugar, an acid to control the grain, a flavoring, and nothing else. The technique of rubbing a cooled syrup against the pan to "grain" it is the same one behind fondant and behind Scottish tablet, in a period when a large kitchen might make its own bonbons, mints and after-dinner sweets rather than buying them in. Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf from 1893, and his 1896 book, largely a compilation, ranges from terrapin to a sheet of vanilla candy snapped along its scored lines. The vanilla itself signals the period's taste for a single clean flavor; "essence of vanilla" of the day was an alcoholic extract.