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Lemon and Maraschino Bonbons
(Italy.) Soak 2 ounces of gum arabic in enough water to dissolve, add 1/4 pint of maraschino, and enough sugar to make a stiff paste when beaten. Make into balls, dip each into some good lemon icing, set aside to dry and use for dessert, or for entertainments.
BARLEY SUGAR.(England.) This is a favorite candy with English school-children, and it is more harmless than most confections. Dissolve any amount needed, say 1 pound of granulated sugar, in only enough water to moisten. Cook it until clear and it will crack when dropped in water. Flavor with the juice of a lemon, pour into oiled pans, and when almost stiff, cut into strips and twist these, dusting with powdered sugar.
Two confections run together on one page: a no-cook gum paste bonbon and a straightforward hard candy. Both are workable, though the first depends entirely on how thoroughly the gum arabic is dissolved.
- Gum arabicSold as acacia gum, in powder or in tears. Powder dissolves in a few hours in warm water; whole tears need overnight soaking and straining through muslin to remove bark and grit. Use roughly equal weight of water to gum for a workable mucilage.
- The quarter pintIf read as an American measure this is half a cup, 4 fluid ounces; an imperial quarter-pint would be 5. Either way it is a great deal of liqueur against 2 ounces of gum, and the paste will need a considerable amount of sugar, likely a pound or more of confectioners' sugar, added gradually until it stops sticking to the hands.
- MaraschinoThe cherry liqueur, clear and dry, not the syrup from a jar of bright red cocktail cherries. Luxardo and Maraska are the usual bottles. The alcohol is not cooked off in this recipe, which is worth knowing before serving the bonbons to children.
- Lemon icingA stiff glace icing: confectioners' sugar beaten with lemon juice to a thick coating consistency. Dip the balls on a fork, let the excess run off, and dry them on a rack over paper rather than on a flat plate, or they set into puddles.
- DryingAllow 24 to 48 hours in a dry room. Gum paste centres firm from the outside in; cut one open before boxing the rest. Humid weather can stall them indefinitely.
- Barley sugar: the temperature"Will crack when dropped in water" is the hard-crack stage, 300 to 310F. A sugar thermometer removes the guesswork. Below about 295F the strips stay tacky and slump within a day.
- Adding the lemon juiceTake the pan off the heat first. Juice is mostly water and will spit violently into syrup at 300F, and the added liquid drops the temperature. Some cooks use a few drops of lemon oil instead to avoid the problem entirely.
- Cutting and twistingPour onto an oiled marble slab or a silicone mat rather than a pan, and work fast with oiled scissors or a heavy knife. The window between cuttable and shattering is a couple of minutes. Wear something on your hands; the sugar is hot enough to burn badly.
- Yield and keepingA pound of sugar gives roughly 30 to 40 twists. Store them layered in waxed paper in an airtight tin, as they pick up moisture from the air and weld into a single mass within days if left open.
Maraschino is the giveaway to the "(Italy.)" label: the liqueur is distilled from marasca cherries, stones and all, and is traced to the Dalmatian coast around Zadar, where it was made commercially from the late eighteenth century and shipped across Europe in straw-covered bottles. Gum arabic, the acacia exudate that binds these bonbons, was the standard body-builder of the nineteenth-century confectioner's bench, used for pastilles, lozenges and jujubes long before gelatine took over that work, and it is the reason a cook could produce a firm sweet with no cooking at all. The barley sugar that follows is a much older English survival: it is traditionally said to have been boiled with barley water, which is the usual explanation offered for the name, though the derivation is disputed, and the French sucre d'orge made by the nuns of Moret-sur-Loing is generally cited as the same tradition. By 1900 the barley had long since dropped out of many recipes, leaving sugar, water and lemon, which is exactly what is given here. The author's remark that it is "more harmless than most confections" reflects a real period anxiety about commercial sweets, which were often coloured with lead chromate, copper salts and other pigments now known to be poisonous.