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Vanilla Sugar
Cut up one pound of Mexican vanilla beans, place them in a mortar with one pound of loaf sugar, and pound them to a fine powder. Sift the sugar through a fine hairsieve, turn what is left in the sieve into the mortar, and pound again. When all is finely-powdered and sifted, put the sugar in bottles, and keep them tightly corked.
A pastry-kitchen staple rather than a dish: a 1:1 blend of ground vanilla bean and sugar, kept corked for flavoring creams, custards and batters. The ratio is far stronger than any modern vanilla sugar, and the quantity is built for a hotel.
- Scale it downA pound of vanilla beans is an extravagance today, running well into three figures. The proportions hold at any size: 1 oz beans to 1 oz sugar, or even a single bean to 2 oz sugar for a milder everyday version.
- Loaf sugarLoaf or cone sugar was hard refined sugar broken from a block, cleaner-tasting than the brown sugars of the day. Granulated sugar is the direct substitute; superfine sifts more easily and needs less pounding.
- Mortar and hair sieveA hair sieve was a fine mesh of woven horsehair. Use a fine-mesh strainer or a tamis. A spice grinder or small food processor does in a minute what the mortar does in twenty, though pulse in short bursts so the sugar does not warm and cake.
- Dry the beans firstSupple, oily beans gum up both mortar and grinder and will make the finished sugar clump in the bottle. Spread them on a tray in a 150F oven, or leave them buried in the sugar in a warm dry place, until they snap rather than bend, then grind.
- The sifting is the pointRepeated pounding and sifting is what gets the fibrous pod down to a powder that dissolves. Anything that refuses to pass the sieve after three rounds can be dropped into a jar of plain sugar to perfume it instead of being forced through.
- Mexican beansMexico was the benchmark source in this period. Adulteration of vanilla flavourings, with tonka bean and with synthetic vanillin, was a known problem of the trade, though the recipe gives no reason for the specification. Tonka bean is barred as a food ingredient in the United States. Buy whole beans, not powder.
- StorageTightly corked means airtight. In a sealed jar away from light the sugar keeps its aroma six months to a year; the ground pod carries oils that will eventually go dull and papery.
- Using itAt full strength this is a flavoring, not a sweetener. A teaspoon perfumes a quart of custard or cream. It also does the work of a vanilla extract in dry mixtures where added liquid is unwelcome, such as meringue or shortbread.
Vanilla is the cured pod of a Mexican orchid, used by the Totonac and later the Aztecs long before it reached Europe with the Spanish; Mexico remained a benchmark source through much of the nineteenth century, and the hand-pollination technique that eventually let plantations flourish elsewhere is generally credited to Edmond Albius on Reunion in the 1840s. Alcoholic vanilla extract existed in Oscar Tschirky's day, and adulterated extracts were a recognised problem before the pure-food legislation of the following decade. Flavoured sugars, made with cinnamon or with orange and lemon zest as well as vanilla, suited a kitchen measuring its output in hundreds of covers a night: one bottle, uniform strength, no bottle of extract to run dry mid-service.