Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Vanilla Drops
Vanilla Drops
Cut up as fine as possible two vanilla beans; place them in a mortar with a little sugar and pound them to a powder. Sift this through a fine sieve, and mix with it one pound of coarsely sifted sugar. Put this in a basin and add gradually, stirring with a spoon, sufficient water to make the paste of such a thickness that it will fall from a spoon and none of it remain sticking to it. Turn the paste into a liquid sugar-pan, place it on the stove, and stir well with a spatula until the sugar is dissolved and makes a slight noise. When on the point of boiling, remove the pan and work well with a spatula until when dropped the paste will retain its former shape and not spread too much. With the pan in the left hand and a piece of wire in the right, let the drops fall on a smooth tin or cartridge paper; harden then in a hot closet for two or three hours, remove from the tin or paper and pack them away for use. Vanilla beans are used in preference to the essence, as the latter is apt to make the paste greasy.
This is a confectioner's sugar drop — essentially a soft fondant piped into buttons and air-dried, not baked. The whole thing hinges on never letting the sugar boil.
- The hinge: do not boilThe paste is heated only until the sugar dissolves and the pan begins to sing, then pulled off. Actual boiling drives off water and pushes the syrup past the fondant stage, and the drops turn hard and glassy instead of setting opaque and short. The recipe gives no temperature; go by its own cue and take the pan off at the first sign of boiling.
- "Liquid sugar-pan"The book does not define the term; it most likely means a heavy pan (copper or brass) kept for sugar work. Any thick-bottomed stainless saucepan does the job; avoid thin aluminium, which scorches sugar at the edges before the centre dissolves.
- QuantitiesOne pound of sugar is about 2 1/4 cups. The water is deliberately unmeasured — add it a teaspoon at a time until the paste drops cleanly from the spoon without a tail; how much it takes depends on the sugar and the day's humidity.
- Grinding the beansTwo split beans pounded with a little sugar in a mortar, then sieved, gives you flecked vanilla sugar. A spice grinder or small food processor does the same in seconds; sift out the fibrous bits so the drops stay smooth.
- Why not extractOscar's objection stands. Alcohol-based extract thins the paste and old-style oil-based essences separated out. If you must substitute, use vanilla paste or the scraped seeds of two pods plus a scraping of the pod interior, not liquid extract.
- "A piece of wire"The nineteenth-century confectioner poured from the pan lip and cut each drop off with a wire. A small piping bag with a plain 1/4-inch tip, or a squeeze bottle, is easier and gives even buttons.
- Cartridge paper and "hot closet"Cartridge paper is a heavy, hard-sized drawing paper; parchment or a silicone mat works better. The hot closet was the warm cupboard above or beside the range — replicate it with an oven at its lowest setting with the door propped, or simply leave the drops uncovered at room temperature overnight in dry weather.
- Yield and keepingA pound of sugar makes on the order of a hundred small drops, depending how large you make them. Once fully dry they keep for weeks in an airtight tin; damp air makes them weep and stick.
Sugar drops of this kind belonged to the confectioner rather than the cook, and their presence in a hotel book reflects how a house like the Waldorf worked: the pastry and confectionery departments turned out petits fours, bonbons and drops by the tray for banquet tables, after-dinner services and the candy dishes set out with coffee. The method is straight fondant practice — dissolve, agitate, drop before it sets — and much the same approach would presumably have served for lemon, rose, peppermint and clove drops, with the flavouring as the chief variable. Vanilla beans were still an expensive import in Oscar Tschirky's day, and the note preferring them to essence is a working confectioner's judgement about texture rather than snobbery: commercial vanilla essences of the period were variable, and often adulterated. The wire-cut drop was standard hand technique before mechanical drop rollers and starch-mogul machines took over most commercial candy production.