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Vanilla Lozenges
Cut up four or five vanilla beans, place them in a mortar with a small quantity of sugar, and pound them to a powder; sift it through a fine sieve, and mix up with two pounds more of sifted sugar on a slab. Form a hollow in the center, and pour in sufficient dissolved gum--or about one-half pound of gum Arabic dissolved in one breakfast cupful of water--to make a stiff paste, and roll it out to about one-eighth of an inch in thickness. Sprinkle the surface with starch powder, and fine sugar, smooth it with the palm of the hand, cut it up into lozenges, place them on wooden trays on the stove, and allow them to dry. Pack them away in tin boxes for use.
A classic gum-paste lozenge: sugar bound with gum arabic, cut and air-dried rather than cooked. Nothing here is difficult, but the paste is unforgiving about moisture, and everything depends on the sugar being fine enough.
- The hinge: sugar fineness"Sifted sugar" here means confectioners' or a very fine caster sugar, not granulated. Granulated sugar will give a gritty paste that cracks when rolled and never dries to a smooth lozenge.
- Gum arabicStill sold as gum acacia, in powder or tears, from baking and confectionery suppliers. Powder dissolves in an hour or two in warm water; whole tears need overnight soaking and straining through muslin to remove bark and grit.
- A breakfast cupfulLarger than a modern measuring cup — roughly 8 to 10 fluid ounces, and the period usage is not consistent. Treat the mucilage as about a pound of gum to a pint of water and add it to the sugar gradually; the recipe itself says "sufficient," which is the honest instruction.
- Vanilla beansPounding whole beans with sugar in a mortar is still the best way to get flavor and flecks together. A spice grinder does it faster; sift out the fibrous bits, which will not soften. Four or five beans to two pounds of sugar is a strong dose by modern standards.
- Starch powderUsually cornstarch, though rice or wheat starch was also used in confectionery. It is a rolling and dusting medium only, keeping the paste from sticking to the slab and the palm; brush the excess off before drying.
- "On the stove"This means the cool back of a coal range or the warming shelf above it — a gently warm surface, not direct heat. A modern equivalent is an oven with the light on, a dehydrator at its lowest setting, or simply a dry room. Sugar-gum paste dried too fast crusts on the surface and stays damp inside.
- Drying timeLikely a day or two, depending on thickness and room humidity; turn the lozenges once so both faces dry. They are ready when they snap cleanly rather than bend.
- Yield and storageTwo pounds of sugar plus the gum solution makes a large batch — several hundred small lozenges. Tins are still the right answer: airtight, since humidity will make them tacky.
Lozenges of this kind sit on the line between the confectioner's shop and the apothecary's counter. The gum-arabic-and-sugar paste was a standard vehicle for anything meant to be dissolved slowly in the mouth — troches of licorice or ipecac in the pharmacy, cachous and pastilles for the breath at the dinner table — and the same formula served whether the flavoring was medicinal or merely pleasant. Vanilla prices had fallen from their early-century peak as cultivation spread, though four or five beans to two pounds of sugar still marked these as a house product rather than a cheap commercial sweet. If this is Oscar Tschirky's Waldorf book, it covers the whole output of a large hotel kitchen, and a jar of house-made lozenges would plausibly have belonged to the same department as the petits fours and after-dinner mints: small things sent out with coffee, and cheap to make in quantity from ingredients the pastry cook already had on the slab.