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Checkermints
Make in the same way as peppermints, but flavor with oil of wintergreen and color pink.
The instruction is a one-line variation on the peppermint patty recipe earlier in the candy chapter, and everything hinges on the flavoring — which is the reason this one cannot be followed as printed.
- Oil of wintergreen is methyl salicylateThe "oil" sold to nineteenth-century confectioners was the distilled essential oil of Gaultheria procumbens or of sweet birch, roughly 98 percent methyl salicylate. It is chemically a salicylate, closely related to aspirin, and it is absorbed readily by mouth.
- No quantity is given"Flavor with oil of wintergreen" leaves the dose entirely to the cook, and the margin is narrow: a single teaspoon of the undiluted oil is in the range associated with fatal salicylate poisoning in a small child. A recipe that seasons a batch of candy by eye with a concentrated salicylate is not one to reproduce.
- Candy is the worst vehicle for itCandy is a poor vehicle for it -- drops of this kind are made in quantity and look identical to one another, so any unevenness in mixing the oil through the batch would concentrate the salicylate in a few pieces.
- Modern flavorings are not the same productBottled wintergreen flavoring on a supermarket shelf is a heavily diluted preparation in alcohol or propylene glycol and is not interchangeable, drop for drop, with the confectioner's oil this book assumes. If you want wintergreen candy, use a current recipe with stated quantities of a food-grade flavoring.
- The pink colorHousehold coloring in this period came from cochineal, beet or the early coal-tar dyes, sold with no purity standards before the 1906 federal food law. This is a second reason to work from a modern recipe rather than this line.
The name is generally taken to come from checkerberry, one of the old American common names for Gaultheria procumbens, the low creeping evergreen of eastern woodlands also called teaberry, boxberry or simply wintergreen. Its leaves and bright red fruit were chewed, brewed as a tea and distilled for their oil. Wintergreen oil's kinship with the salicylates was understood in pharmacy by this date — it was rubbed on aching joints as well as dropped into candy — but the hazard of the concentrated oil in a kitchen was not something cookbooks of the period generally thought to mention.