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Confectionery
There are very few modern kitchens in which some cooking utensil may not be found convenient for making candy. A sauce-pan of tinned iron, with a handle and flaring sides, and a lip to facilitate the pouring of the contents, will be found best adapted to such use; or a small iron or brass kettle will do if kept quite clean. Dissolve four pounds white sugar in one quart water; place this in a porcelain kettle over a slow fire for half an hour, pour into it a small quantity of gelatine and gum-arabic dissolved together; all the impurities which rise to the surface skim off at once. Instead of gelatine and gum-arabic, the white of an egg may be used as a substitute with good results. To make the clarifying process still more perfect, strain through a flannel bag. To make rock candy, boil this syrup a few moments, allow to cool, and crystallization takes place on the sides of the vessel. To make other candies, bring the syrup very carefully to such a degree of heat that the "threads," which drop from the spoon when raised into the colder air, will snap like glass. When this stage is reached, add a teaspoon of vinegar or cream tartar to prevent "graining," and pour into pans as directed in the recipes which follow. To make round stick candies, pull, and roll into shape with well-floured hands as soon as cool enough to be handled. In pulling candy, some grease the hands, others flour them slightly. Colored candies are often 'injurious, and sometimes even poisonous, and should be avoided. In baking macaroons and kisses, use washed butter for greasing the tins, as lard or salt butter gives an unpleasant taste. Bake in '113) a moderate oven, or let dry in a cool oven for two hours. After buttering, sprinkling lightly with flour and then shaking it off, is an excellent way to prepare the pan. When powdered almonds are to be used, they should be thoroughly dried in an open oven, after blanching, and they will pulverize more easily. In making macaroons or drops, or pulling butter-scotch or taffy, grease hands lightly with butter to prevent sticking. Flouring the hands is apt to give an unpleasant taste to candy.
This is the general preamble to a candy chapter rather than a single sweet, but it contains a working syrup recipe and the whole technique of pulled and rock candy. A few of its instructions have been overtaken by the candy thermometer.
- The hinge: read the temperature, not the threadThreads that "snap like glass" in cold air is the hard-crack stage, 300-310F. Anything under about 290F stays chewy, and past 320F the sugar begins to caramelize and turn bitter. A clip-on thermometer removes the guesswork the original cook had to live with.
- The syrup proportionsFour pounds of white sugar to one quart of water is roughly a 2:1 ratio by weight, a very wet syrup that needs long boiling. Expect a little under 4 lb of finished candy, and use a pan at least three times the volume of the syrup, since it climbs sharply as it approaches hard crack.
- Clarifying is optional nowGum arabic, gelatine and egg white were used to raise scum from imperfectly refined sugar. Modern granulated sugar has no such impurities, so the clarifying step and the flannel bag can be skipped entirely.
- Rock candy takes days, not momentsCrystals will not form on the sides of the vessel in the time implied here. Rock candy needs a saturated syrup left undisturbed with a seed string or skewer for a week or more; the syrup must also be boiled to about 240F first, not just "a few moments."
- Vinegar or cream of tartarBoth work as invert-sugar agents that discourage graining, but add them at the start of boiling rather than at the end, when the syrup is too hot to mix them in evenly.
- Avoid the brass kettleAn unlined brass or copper pan in contact with an acidified sugar syrup can pick up metal from the surface. Use stainless steel or an enamelled pan; "tinned iron" is the period's equivalent and its modern stand-in is any heavy non-reactive saucepan.
- Oven numbersA "moderate oven" for macaroons and kisses is 350F. "Let dry in a cool oven for two hours" means the lowest setting available, around 200F, which is how meringue kisses are still handled.
- Washed butterButter kneaded under cold water to rinse out salt and buttermilk solids. Unsalted butter does the same job; the point is that salt and milk solids scorch and flavour the sugar.
- Flour versus butter on the handsThe text contradicts itself, mentioning both and then warning that flour gives an unpleasant taste. Butter is the better choice for pulling, and heat-resistant gloves make the job considerably less painful.
The Dixie Cook Book belongs to the era when home candy-making moved out of the confectioner's shop and into the domestic kitchen, and its opening line — that few modern kitchens lack a suitable pan — is a small boast about equipment. The clarifying instructions with gum arabic, gelatine or egg white are borrowed straight from professional sugar refining, where they were genuinely necessary before industrial refining produced consistently white sugar. The blunt warning that "colored candies are often injurious, and sometimes even poisonous" was not alarmism: nineteenth-century sweets were commonly tinted with mineral pigments including chrome yellow (lead chromate) and copper-arsenic greens, and poisoning cases from coloured confectionery were widely reported in the decades before food adulteration laws. Gum arabic, the dried sap of acacia trees, was a standard grocery item then and survives today mostly as an industrial additive, which is why the step reads as obscure now.