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Honey Caramels
Place in a copper basin two gills each thick honey and thick cream, a half gill Jamaica rum half teaspoon vanilla essence, the juice of half a sound lemon and two pounds granulated sugar, set basin on fire and stir with spatula until it reaches the third degree. Add two ounces good fresh butter and stir while boiling for three minutes longer. Drop on a lightly oiled marble, let thoroughly cool off, keeping one-third-inch thick by means of iron rods placed around it, then cut in half-inch squares, wrap in wax paper and use when desired.
A professional confectioner's formula written in shorthand: no thermometer, no yield, and a copper basin assumed. The whole recipe hinges on hitting the right sugar stage.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, so two gills each of honey and cream is one cup of each, and a half gill of rum is a quarter cup. Two pounds of granulated sugar is about 4 1/2 cups.
- "The third degree"This is the old French confectioner's ladder of sugar stages rather than a temperature, and different books number it differently, so treat it as genuinely ambiguous. Caramels of this composition are boiled to the firm-ball stage, roughly 245-250F on a candy thermometer; the further three minutes with butter takes it a little beyond that.
- Copper basinUnlined copper conducts fast and evenly, which is why confectioners used it. Any heavy, wide, straight-sided pan will do, but choose one several times the volume of the syrup, since honey and cream foam up hard as they boil.
- Honey scorchesHoney's fructose browns at a lower temperature than cane sugar, so this mixture darkens and can catch well before plain caramel would. Keep the heat moderate once past the boil and stir the corners of the pan constantly.
- Iron rodsThese are caramel bars, laid on the marble to frame the poured candy at a set depth. Four lengths of steel bar, or a lightly oiled sheet pan lined with parchment, will hold the slab at an even depth.
- MarbleA cold stone slab pulls heat out fast and stops the candy cooking on. A granite countertop, chilled, works; a warm wooden board does not, and the caramel will stay soft and spread.
- Cutting and wrappingCut with an oiled heavy knife or a bench scraper while the slab is cool but not cold-hard. Wrapping each square is not decorative -- unwrapped honey caramels weep and fuse together in a tin.
- YieldRoughly 2 3/4 lb of finished candy.
Alexander Filippini spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and The International Cook Book reflects the working vocabulary of that trade: degrees rather than thermometer readings, copper basins, marble slabs, iron rods. The instruction to boil "to the third degree" would have been unremarkable to a hotel confectioner and nearly useless to a home cook, which is a fair summary of how such books were assembled -- professional formulas lightly repackaged for domestic readers. Honey in a caramel is the older practice; before cheap refined cane sugar, honey did the sweetening in European confectionery outright, and it survived afterwards as a flavouring that also keeps candy soft, since its fructose resists crystallising. The rum and vanilla are there as flavourings; the lemon juice does other work, its acid inverting some of the sugar and further discouraging a grainy set.