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Chewing Gum
Prepared balsam of tulu, two ounces; refined sugar, one ounce; oatmeal, three ounces. Soak the gum in water, then mix all the ingredients; roll in powdered sugar to make the sticks.
This is a druggist's formula rather than a confectioner's, and it belongs to a period when the line between the pharmacy counter and the candy counter was thin. It cannot be reproduced today.
- "Balsam of tulu" is balsam of ToluA soft, aromatic oleoresin tapped from Myroxylon balsamum, a South American tree, and sold by nineteenth-century chemists for cough syrups and lozenges. It was never a grocery item, and today it survives only as an industrial flavour and fragrance material rather than something sold to home cooks.
- The quantity is the problemBalsam of Tolu survives in modern use only as a trace flavour and fragrance material, at fractions of a percent. Here it is two ounces out of six, a third of the mixture by weight, putting the dose orders of magnitude above any current food use.
- A recognised sensitiserThe related Peru balsam is one of the standard substances on dermatological patch-test panels precisely because it provokes contact and oral allergic reactions in a small but consistently recorded share of people; Tolu balsam is closely related and appears in fragrance test series. Prolonged chewing puts it against the mucous membranes for as long as the gum lasts.
- Pharmacy grade is not food gradeWhat is available today is sold as a perfumery or apothecary raw material, with no controls on the solvents, adulterants or resin substitutes historically used to extend it. "Prepared" in the original meant whatever the local druggist's preparation was, which is unknowable.
- No chewing base at allReal gum of the period was chicle, spruce resin or paraffin, all of which are inert and pass through unchanged. A soft balsam plus oatmeal gives a crumbling paste that breaks down and is swallowed rather than chewed, which is exactly what makes the dose above meaningful.
- If you want to make gumUse a current recipe built on food-grade chicle or gum base, which is sold to home confectioners, and flavour it with extracts intended for food.
Chewing gum recipes turn up in late nineteenth-century household books because gum was then a novelty that a household might plausibly make, and because the formulas circulated out of pharmacy manuals, where balsam of Tolu was already a fixture of cough syrups, pastilles and "pectoral" lozenges. Its warm, vanilla-and-cinnamon smell is what recommended it; the same resin still perfumes soaps and a few liqueurs. The commercial trade was moving the other way by the time this book appeared: chicle, the latex of the Central American sapodilla, had been introduced to American manufacturers in the 1860s and 1870s and by 1900 had largely overtaken the older spruce-resin and paraffin gums, though those continued to be sold into the early twentieth century. Domestic formulas like this one, leaning on whatever chewable resin the druggist stocked and padded out with oatmeal, are a snapshot of home confectionery trying to imitate a factory product it had no access to the raw material for.