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Cream Candies
Three and one-half pounds of sugar to one and onehalf pints of water; dissolve in the water before putting with the sugar one-quarter of an ounce of fine white gum arabic, and when added to the sugar put in one teaspoon of cream of tartar. The candy should not be boiled quite to the brittle stage. The proper degree can be ascertained if, when a small skimmer is put in and taken out, when blowing through the holes of the skimmer, the melted sugar is forced through in feathery filaments: remove from the fire at this point and rub the syrup against the sides of the dish with an iron spoon. If it is to be a chocolate candy, add two ounces of chocolate finely sifted and such flavouring as you prefer, vanilla, rose, or orange. If you wish to make cocoanut candy, add this while soft and stir until cold.
A boiled-sugar cream candy — essentially a coarse fondant, grained deliberately by rubbing the hot syrup against the pan. The whole thing turns on stopping the boil at the right point and then forcing the sugar to crystallize.
- The hinge: grain it, do not let it set clearRubbing the syrup against the side of the pan with a spoon seeds crystallization, which is what makes the candy "cream" rather than glassy. If you skip it, you get hard candy; if you overwork it while very hot, you get a coarse, gritty texture.
- The feather test in degreesBlowing syrup through a skimmer into filaments is the old "feather" trial; modern tables generally put it somewhere around 240-245F, just past soft ball, though period sources disagree on the exact point. The "brittle" stage the recipe warns against corresponds roughly to what is now called hard crack, about 300-310F.
- PintsThis book is Canadian, so the pint is likely imperial (20 fl oz), making 1.5 pints about 3.75 cups. If read as US pints it is 3 cups. Either works; the extra water only means a longer boil.
- Gum arabicA quarter ounce is about 2 teaspoons of powder. Sold as gum acacia in baking and cake-decorating suppliers, it keeps the candy smooth and slightly chewy. It can be left out with no harm to the sugar chemistry.
- Cream of tartarOne teaspoon in this quantity of sugar inverts some of the sucrose and keeps the crystals fine. Do not increase it — too much and the batch will refuse to grain at all.
- ChocolateTwo ounces of nineteenth-century "chocolate finely sifted" means grated plain chocolate, unsweetened, not cocoa powder or anything sugared. Modern 100% baking chocolate is the nearest available substitute.
- CocoanutDried unsweetened shredded coconut, stirred in while the mass is still soft. Sweetened bagged coconut will push an already very sweet candy over the edge.
- Pan and spoonUse a heavy saucepan at least four times the volume of the syrup — boiling sugar climbs. A wooden spoon does the graining as well as the iron one and is easier on the pan.
- YieldThree and a half pounds of sugar makes close to four pounds of finished candy, enough for a large gathering. Halving or quartering the batch is sensible for a modern kitchen.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in the 1870s from contributions by local women and sold in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children, making it one of the earliest and most successful North American charity cookbooks. Its candy chapter reflects a moment when home confectionery was newly practical: refined white sugar had become cheap, and instructions of this kind circulated widely in domestic manuals before household thermometers were common — hence the skimmer-and-breath test, one of a graded series of cook's trials (thread, blow, feather, ball, crack) inherited from professional confectioners. Gum arabic, imported acacia resin long used by apothecaries and confectioners alike, was one such smoothing agent, and its appearance here suggests the writer expected a reader with access to a good druggist. "Cocoanut" was the usual spelling of the period.