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Horehound Candy
Boil two ounces of dried horehound in a pint and a half water for about half an hour; strain and add three and a half pounds brown sugar. Boil over a hot fire until it is sufficiently hard, pour out in flat, well-greased tin trays, and mark into sticks or small squares with a knife, as soon as it is cool enough to retain its shape.
A boiled-sugar candy with a herbal infusion standing in for most of the water. The whole recipe hinges on cooking the syrup far enough — everything else is straightforward.
- The hinge: hard crack"Sufficiently hard" means the hard-crack stage, 300–310°F on a thermometer, or a drizzle into cold water that shatters rather than bends. Stop short of that and the sticks stay tacky and slump within a day.
- MeasuresA pint and a half is 3 cups (24 fl oz). Two ounces of dried horehound is by weight, and it is a bulky, leafy 2 ounces — roughly 2 to 3 loosely packed cups of dried herb.
- Where to find horehoundMarrubium vulgare, dried leaf and flowering top, sold by herb suppliers rather than supermarkets. It is intensely bitter and camphorous; there is no substitute that tastes like it.
- Strain properlyStrain the infusion through a fine sieve lined with cloth. Stray leaf fragments scorch on the pan bottom during the long boil to hard crack and throw a burnt note through the whole batch.
- Brown sugar behaves differentlyPeriod brown sugar was less refined than today's, and its molasses content darkens fast at high heat. Use a heavy-bottomed pan, keep the heat moderate rather than the "hot fire" once the syrup thickens, and do not stir after it comes to the boil.
- TraysGrease shallow rimmed sheet pans and warm them slightly before pouring; cold metal sets the edges before the syrup spreads. Score with an oiled knife while the sheet is still pliable, then snap along the lines when cold.
- Yield and storageThree and a half pounds of sugar gives roughly the same weight in finished candy — about 100 small squares. Wrap the pieces individually or dust with a little cornstarch; horehound candy picks up moisture from the air and welds itself into one mass.
- A note on the herbHorehound is a traditional cough remedy taken in medicinal quantity, and is generally advised against in pregnancy. Eaten as candy it is food, but this is not a mild flavouring — a first batch is worth halving.
Horehound is an Old World mint-family plant that travelled with European settlers as a garden physic and naturalized widely across North America; by the nineteenth century its bitter, faintly menthol infusion was a common household treatment for coughs and sore throats. Boiling that infusion into sugar solved two problems at once: it preserved the dose and made it palatable, which is why horehound drops sat as comfortably in a druggist's jar as on a candy counter. Its appearance in the confectionery section of a general household book like The Dixie Cook Book reflects a period when the line between sweet and remedy was thin. Horehound candy survived the transition to commercial manufacture and is still sold as old-fashioned drops, one of the few frankly bitter sweets to hold its place.