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Strawberry Drops
Strawberry drops are to be prepared same as peppermint drops, but substituting a half gill strawberry syrup for peppermint and water.
A one-line variation that assumes you have the peppermint drop recipe in front of you, so the working details live there. What follows covers the measurement, the substitution, and the ways fruit syrup behaves differently from flavored water.
- Half a gillIn US measure a gill is 4 fluid ounces, so half a gill is 2 fluid ounces, or 1/4 cup (an imperial gill would be 5 fl oz, making it 2 1/2). The line says it stands in for both the peppermint and the water of the parent recipe.
- Read the parent recipe firstPeppermint drops of this kind are generally a boiled sugar syrup taken to what modern cooks call the soft-ball stage (about 238-240F), then stirred until it clouds and creams and dropped from a spoon or paper cone onto a marble slab or oiled paper. The book gives no stage or temperature here, and nothing in this line changes the method.
- The hinge: sugar in the syrupCommercial strawberry syrup is already sugar, often partly inverted, plus fruit acid. Both invert sugar and acid slow crystallization, so the batch may need more stirring before it sets and may stay softer than the peppermint version. Judge by the temperature on a thermometer rather than by the look of the boil.
- Choose the right syrupThis wants a thick sweetened fruit syrup of the soda-fountain type, not thin strawberry water and not a modern pancake syrup thickened with gums. Gums and starches will make the finished drop cloudy and chewy.
- Flavor strengthTwo ounces of fruit syrup carries far less flavor punch than a few drops of peppermint oil, so the result is delicate. Reducing the syrup slightly before use concentrates it without adding more liquid.
- Work fast and warmOnce the boiled sugar begins to cream it sets within a minute or two. Have the paper or slab laid out beforehand, and keep the pan over the barest heat or in a bowl of hot water while you deposit the drops.
- HumidityFruit-syrup drops absorb moisture readily and go tacky on a damp day. Store them in a tightly closed tin between sheets of waxed paper.
Sugar drops were among the plainest things a confectioner made: boiled syrup, a flavoring, and a hand steady enough to deposit even beads before the batch grained solid. Oil of peppermint was cheap, shelf-stable, and strong enough that a very little flavored a large batch, and cookbooks of this sort commonly treat the peppermint drop as the base recipe with other flavors given as substitutions -- as here. Fruit-flavored versions were practical once bottled fruit syrups were a common grocery and soda-fountain item. The compression suggests the intended reader was a cook already expected to know the sugar stages, who needed only to be told what to leave out and what to put in its place.