UNSEASONAL fruit which has never been near a tree is a recurring theme in confectionery. A whole dessert of perfect orchard produce and berries could be shaped from marzipan or cast sugar, artfully coloured and piled in baskets as if fresh from the garden. At a sweetmeat banquet, this conceit was as valued for its artifice as the originals were esteemed for freshness and beauty. The epitome of that banquet experience is the fruit drop, whose allure lies in the massing of shapes and the sparkling colour, intense and glowing like gemstones. There are two notable things about fruit drops (and acid drops, and other boiled sweets). They are transparent and they have gone quite quickly from being a technical novelty to something banal. Clear sugar sweets are now so ubiquitous that they seem a logical outcome of sugar-boiling but they represent centuries of progressive technique, control, and ingenuity in the use of flavours and colours. In 1932, Fred Steel wrote: 'To the confectioner who is not interested in chocolate covering, the sweet of greatest interest is, without doubt, the hard-boiled drop. There is in this class of goods ample scope for the confectioner to display his skill.' Hard-boiled drops have now been relegated to the niche of 'old time favourites'. 

The discovery that tartaric acid prevented the sugar from graining at high temperatures eased the sugar-boiler's trials when making transparent boiled sweets. In his tradesman's handbook, Skuse spelt out the problem and its solution: 

Refined sugars, whether lump or crystallized, when boiled to any degree above the 'ball,' or 250 [°F; 121°C] by the thermometer, are grainy, and 
 

would, if turned out of the pan, become a solid lump of hard candied sugar. To prevent this the grain must be cut by the addition of cream of tartar, which in its action will cause the sugar to be pliable while hot, and transparent when cold.

Not that confectioners were aware of this; they just knew if they followed the rules, the result would be beautiful, translucent, gem-like confections. It was all part of the semi-magical world of sugar-work. From the 1680s, when Giles Rose translated the term casse, until the early nineteenth century, confectioners remained circumspect about high-temperature boiling, although they did have one advantage over the modern sugar-boiler in beginning with clarified syrup. This meant all sugar was properly dissolved. When the starting point is granulated sugar and water, the confectioner must ensure every crystal of sugar is dissolved before it begins to boil. 

This recipe, translated by Giles Rose, might have produced something approaching a modern high-boiled drop: 

To make Carmalet 

Boyl your sugar to that height, call'd breaking or casse, being boyl'd take it from the Fire, and perfume it with a little Amber, and so put it out in little rounds, upon a plate or dish. 

Caramel: Lorsque votre sucre sera à cassé, mettez-y la cooleur telle que vous jugerez à propos avec quatre ou cinq gouttes de jus de citrons, suivant la quantité que vous aurez de sucre, pour empêcher qu'iI ne graine; vous l'etsayez comme an cassé, et lorsque vous verrez qu'il se cassera net comme le verre, il sera au caramel.  

[Caramel: Once your sugar has reached cassé add the amount of colour you think appropriate along with four or five drops of lemon juice, according to the amount of sugar, to prevent it from graining; test as for casse', and once it breaks as clean as glass, it is at caramel.] 

Gilliers described grain as a confectioner's expression for little globules of sugar, the size of a grain of corn, in a preserve or sugar cooked to caramel. He recognized various causes, amongst which were over- cooking preserves, insufficient lemon juice, or badly clarified sugar. Graisser was the term he used for sugar cooked to caramel with lemon juice added. Shortly afterwards, this appeared in English as 'greasing' 

the sugar. It was not long before it was clear that confectioners in England knew about preventing grain, as shown by Jarrin's recipe for transparent barley sugar: When the sugar is near the crack, add to it two or three drops of lemon juice to prevent its graining, or a little vinegar or alum dissolved in water; any acid will grease sugar.' 

When the sugar is near the crack, add to it two or three drops of lemon juice to prevent its graining, or a little vinegar or alum dissolved in water; any acid will grease sugar.

Acids had been combined with sugar for centuries: naturally occurring ones were added inadvertently with fruit juices used for flavourings and others were added for special effects. Some juices worked well as doctors even when the effect was not desired. Jarrin warned readers to be careful with barberry, raspberry and pineapple juices because they would grease the sugar. Lemon juice was considered most effective and convenient, perhaps because it had little flavouring effect. William Finemore recommended that a glass container should be marked with graduations of a teaspoonful on the sides specially for adding the appropriate amount of lemon juice. Tartaric acid was widely used, as well as less palatable substances such as vitriol. The best confectioners were careful over their choice of doctor. Skuse remarked: 

Several other acids have been used with more or less success, such as pyroligneous acid, sulphuric acid, vinegar &C, but experience has taught me that cream of tartar is the best, safest, and most to be relied on.

Tartaric acid and cream of tartar had the advantage over lemon juice that they were available as a powder. Stored in a dry place, they kept almost indefinitely. Under the older name of argil, tartar had been known as a crystalline deposit on the inside of wine-barrels. The original reason for adding it to confectionery remains a mystery. It may have been considered good for one's health, or it may have entered the sweet-making process on the back of another ingredient: it was often used in formulae for making cochineal colour. Butter and cream (and other fats, such as palm or coconut oil) are another category of doctor; they work because the molecules of protein and fat involved are very different to those of sugar. They were not used for transparent sweets but were important in toffee making. Toffee boilers also used molasses which, with honey and glucose, form a third group. 

For many confectioners, glucose remained an unknown quantity into the 1890s, when Skuse was obliged to explain: 

I have had several letters enquiring what 'glucose' was.. glucose is a beautiful white and clear syrup extracted from wheat starch, being a chemical conversion of the sugar found in it. Some sugar boilers use it in boiling sugar for drops, &c. 

Figure 27. The orris root, Iris florentina, from Pomet's Complete History of Drugs (1747). It was used mainly as a flavouring agent, the root considered to have a smell like that of violets or raspberries when dried and powdered.

Lemon Acid Drops  
4 lb Lump Sugar-pint of Water-boil to the Ball-add 2/4 Teaspoonsfull of Lemon Juice-boil to the crack-pour it on a very clean and well oiled marble Slab then add to the Sugar 1 oz of Tartaric Acid and a little Essence of Lemon mould it well to mix in the Acid-put it into a tin-Oiled- before the Fire to keep it hot-cut off pieces as you want it roll it on a marble slab dusted with powdered Sugar cut with Scissors into small pieces and rolled quite round on a Penbrie Slab-and flattened-then put into powdered Sugar 

Rose Acid Drops  
Same as Lemon Acid Drops coloured with Cochineal Colour-and flavoured with Otto [attar] of Rose. 

when English marauders foraging plums for supplies were worsted by the Scots. In the eighteenth century, confectioners making boiled sugar relied heavily on flavours which had long been in use, including flowers (rose, violet, orange flower, carnation) and spices (cinnamon, clove, ginger). Acid was used occasionally, probably for supposed medicinal value or visual and flavouring effect. An instance is Culpeper's suggestion to add vitriol to violet cordial to redden it and sharpen the taste. The range of fruit flavours open to confectioners was limited. Jarrin and his West End colleagues could afford to buy pineapples and other fruit and employ journeymen to extract the juice, but even they must have encountered problems such as the instability of some flavours at high temperatures. 

For the less ambitious, options were limited. Stavely suggested only peppermint, lemon essence, ginger and horehound for the small provincial confectioner making candy and pulled sugar. William Finemore's notes also show only a few flavours in use with boiled sugar. Apart from tartaric acid and otto [attar] of rose, he mentions 

Figure 28. An early twentieth-century trade advertisement for essences, flavourings and colours especially for use in high-boiled sweets.

mint oil, ginger, clove oil, essence of lemon and 'raspberry'. The latter was actually orris root and tartaric acid in red-coloured sugar. Rose was a flavour with a very long precedent. The combination of it with acid shows a transition in taste: the sensation of sharp and sweet combined with familiar floweriness. Rose acid was described as a transparent sweet by Henry Mayhew, suggesting this was still a novelty in 1850. Acidity and texture continued to be exploited, but flavours changed and the range expanded, swinging away from flowers and spices. This was partly due to developments in applied chemistry, displayed with many other achievements at the Great Exhibition of 1851. One advance, breathlessly reported by the Illustrated London News, was the synthesis of artificial flavourings: 

In one department, lozenges from the pine-apple, jargonelle pears, and various other fruits have been sent. Mr Langdale has furnished oils of cognac, pears, pine-apples and grapes, which so exactly taste and smell of those fruits, that few would be able to distinguish them. These preparations are, to our mind, the most extraordinary productions of modern chemistry; for the fruits themselves have nothing to do with the matter, and they are simply made from the refuse of distilleries. We heat that they are now extensively employed.

sweets suddenly meant that everyone could taste fruit at any time of the year. For a few decades, high-boiled drops were probably seen as an affordable substitute for fruit, at least by the poor. They combined sophisticated sugar work, bright colour, fancy shapes and flavours which only the rich were usually privileged to taste. The twentieth- century view is that sweets are decidedly inferior: given the choice between a ripe dessert pear and a pear drop there is little contest. Consider the differences. A perfectly ripe pear is that late twentieth- century oxymoron- a healthy, low calorie, virtuous treat. It is soft, juicy, perfumed and generally delicious, turns bad in a few days, and the season is short. What about the pear drop? It is small, approximately pear shaped, any colour the confectioner fancies but usually half red, half yellow. Dry and hard, pear drops have little smell until someone else is eating them, when they produce a strong aroma reminiscent of pear, with the addition of a curious and intense sweetness which catches at the top of the nose. They keep forever (several months, anyway). As sweets, they have acquired many negative implications to do with calorie content and dental caries. 

Now imagine you are a child of a poor family in an industrial town of the 1860s. Pears, during the few short weeks when they appeared in the greengrocers, were expensive, smelt delicious. There are no pears on the market stalls at present (not much fresh fruit of any sort at this time of year), but the sweet-stuff seller has a new line of bright red and yellow sugar drops which, he says, taste just like the preserved Jargonelle pears that the quality eat, so you buy a few with a penny earned for running an errand and are soon enjoying the flavour. 

Of the contradictions behind fruit drops, the altered status of sugar is the one now most apparent. Expensive, it was valued by the rich; once cheap, sugar was fantasy land for the poor. It represented dreams whose only limitation was the skill and imagination of the confectioner. Objects wrought in transparent sugar were diverse: classical statues, pineapples, pistols, fish... whatever the confectioner 

thought would appeal to the customers. If real fruit wasn't available, or was too expensive, it could always be modelled using syrup cast in moulds or bits of fruit paste. In the twentieth century the dogma is 'fresh fruit good; sugar confectionery bad' and 'natural is best, artifice is wrong'. Yet artifice has always lain behind getting any out-of-season or exotic fruit to the table. Now it goes into transport and packaging, not the use of sugar as a preservative. In the past, the taste of preserved fruit represented luxury, and the growing control confectioners had over making transparent, flavoured sugar shapes was an admirable novelty. Pears and pear drops, fruit and fruit drops- the sweets were models of the real thing, a glimpse of possibilities. 

Fruit sweetmeats, including a few using honey, can be traced back to the earliest collections of recipes. The confectioner faced with a glut of fruit had three options: preserve It whole (in syrup or candied); cook to a homogenous paste; extract the juice and boil it with sugar to make a jelly. In skilful hands, all three were exploited for decorative, beautifully coloured and flavoured sweetmeats. 

Preserving whole involved a serious attempt to conserve the integrity of fruits so that they appeared as natural as possible. All recipes for preserves or 'suckets' began by cooking fruit gently, and then steeping in syrup over several days. The syrup was concentrated by boiling a little more each day (if a concentrated syrup is used initially, the fruit toughens and shrivels). Finally, fruit and syrup were transferred to gallipots or glasses and sealed with bladder or paper until needed. Drained, the preserves could be sprinkled with fine sugar, or candied by dipping them in sugar boiled to candy height so encasing each piece in a sugar shell. The method uses syrups boiled to relatively low temperatures. Candied fruits are still made with varying degrees of skill in France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and their former colonies. The quantities of sugar required, as well as the time and expertise, make these expensive and luxurious sweetmeats even now. 

The other options of making pastes or jellies destroyed the form of the fruit but allowed more freedom with colour, texture and shape. Many sweetmeats took the colour of the fruit from which they were made: pale, pinky beiges from apples or pears, the warm oranges of peaches or apricots, deep pinks and reds from berries. Confectioners also learnt to manipulate colour in some fruit. Rapid open boiling of quinces produced a pale, orange-red paste, or 'quince paste white' (white was a relative term); slow, close-covered simmering made a deeper colour, 'quince paste red'. 

Fruit for paste is cooked to a homogenous mass, then boiled with an equal weight of sugar until it sets when cold. Getting this right was a matter of experience. Quinces were popular because their high pectin content meant paste made from them set reliably. For fancy 

work such as 'jumballs' (knots), paste had to be quite dry, so that it became slightly elastic and strong enough to be worked by rolling into lengths. Alternatively, paste was simply cut in lozenges or other shapes. Coated with powder sugar, it would have been not unlike a soft version of a fruit pastille. Apple paste was sometimes coloured and shaped to counterfeit fruit such as cherries; adding a stalk to each piece completed the effect. Making fruit jellies began in the same way as paste, but involved straining the cooked fruit to extract the juice. Again, quinces were the archetypal fruit for the method. Both pastes and jellies could be elaborately moulded or 'printed' with motifs, as in Sir Hugh Plat's recipe: 

Quidini of Quinces  
Take the kernells out of eight great Quinces, and boile them in a quart of spring water, till it come to a pinte, then put into it a quarter of a pinte of Rosewater and one pound of fine Sugar, and so let it boile till you see it come to bee of a deepe colour: then take a drop, and drop it on the bottome of a sawcer, and if it stand, take it off, then let it run through a jelly bagge into a bason upon a chafing dish of coles to keep it warm, then take a spoone, and fill your boxes as full as you please... and if you please, printe it in mouldes.

Getting pastes and jellies to setting consistency without spoiling the flavour by overboiling must have been problematic with many fruits. Confectioners boosted the pectin content of some fruit by adding juice from cooked apples or gooseberries. Another method for encouraging setting was to make 'clear cakes,' as told by Eliza Smith: 

SWEET ACIDITY

Take your gooseberries, or other fruit, and put them in an earthen pot, stopt very close, and put them in a kettle of water, and let them boil till they break ... run them through a cloth; take the weight of the liquor in sugar; boil the sugar candy high; then put in your juice, and let it stand over a few embers to dry till it is thick like a jelly ... pout it into clear cake glasses and dry them with a little fire.

[T]hen set the pulpe over the fire againe, and put thereto a good quantitie of red wine, and boile them wel to a stiffenesse. . and when they be almost sufficiently boyled, put in a convenient proportion of sugar: stir all well together and put it in your gaily pots.

 For an authentic seventeenth-century flavour, if you can obtain a little ambergris to use in place of the vanilla, a scrap the size of a rice grain will be plenty. Put the sugar and water in a small pan and heat gently, stirring to dissolve all crystals. Increase the heat and boil to the upper end of hard crack, about 154°C. Immediately remove the pan from the fire and quench it by dipping the base quickly in a bowl of cold water. Add the ambergris or vanilla, and allow to melt into the mixture. Quickly drop the syrup in small rounds on the oiled slab or tray and leave to cool. 

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Figure 33. The fruit bonbon: the fruit paste centre relies on a centuries-old technique, whilst the crunchy casing is similar to high-boiled sugar used in fruit drops. 

114

  
It is an advantage to have help when shaping these sweets, as the sugar cools and stiffens quite rapidly. Dissolve the sugar in the water. When every crystal has vanished, increase the heat and boil to hard ball, 121°C. Add the lemon juice and continue to boil to hard crack (149°C). Immediately remove from the heat and dip the base of the pan in cold water to halt cooking. Carefully pour the hot sugar in a pool on the slab or tray (watch it doesn't run off the edge). Immediately sprinkle over the tartaric acid, and drop the rose oil and food colour onto it. As it cools, a skin forms on the surface. Take the scraper, and flip the edges of the mass to the middle. Repeat this action several times, until the colour has dispersed through the mixture. As soon as the mass of sugar is cool enough to handle, make it into a long stick about a finger's thickness. Use the scissors to cut off pieces a little under an inch long and roll them into balls. Drop into icing sugar and, when cool, store in an airtight bottle with some of the sugar. 

Always handle hot sugar with caution. If it becomes too stiff to work easily, heat it at the open door of a warm oven (about 160°C, Gas 3). 

 Wash the fruit and remove any blemishes; cut into quarters or eighths, depending on size; discard the pips. Put in a pan with the litre of water and cook gently, stirring occasionally. As the fruit disintegrates quite fast and the chances of it sticking increase, stir more as it thickens. Add the sugar and rosewater. When reduced to a well-cooked pulp, take the pan off the heat and run the contents through a jelly bag into a clean pan. It is better not to let it drip too long, because there is a small risk of the pectin beginning to set-about 60-90 minutes should be enough. The remaining puree can be sieved and mixed with cream or custard for a fool. Bring the syrup back to a gentle boil, skim and allow to reduce a little. Check for setting by dropping a little on a cold saucer and when it makes a very firm jelly, run into the dishes or boxes to a depth of about 1 cm. Apples of the pippin type (for example, Cox) make an acceptable quidini, although quinces work better. If quinces are available, substitute them for the apples. Remember that they take much longer to soften and do not collapse to a puree as apples do, and that they also contain very strong pectin, so the chances of the juice setting after it drips through the bag are increased. Seventeenth-century confectioners also suggest using plums and raspberries, but these do not set as reliably. I find the colour produced by quinces and apples during cooking unpredictable: generally, the longer and slower they are cooked, the deeper and redder they become. 

Wash the damsons and put in a pan with the wine. Cook gently until they have disintegrated. Push through a sieve or a mouli-legumes, discarding stones and skin. Weigh the pulp and measure (in a separate bowl) an equal amount of sugar. Return the pulp to a clean pan and stir it over medium heat for 5-10 minutes to dry it a little. Add the sugar, stir well to dissolve, and cook fairly briskly. Stir constantly until the paste thickens and a wooden spoon leaves a trail when drawn across the bottom of the pan. Remove from the heat and pour into the lined tin, shaking gently to level the paste. Leave overnight to cool. 

Next day, dredge a board or tray with granulated sugar and turn the paste onto it. Peel off the paper, and sugar the top of the paste as well. Cut into lozenges, toss in sugar and store in a box with sheets of paper between the layers. 

Other stone fruit such as apricots and peaches also make good paste, but use white wine with these.