English Boiled Sweets 09/03/2010

The American description of boiled sweets – 'hard candy', gives a pretty good definition! They also have the category of 'soft candy' which covers all the fudges and toffees – all of which are also produced by boiling. However when us Brits say 'boiled sweet' we have clear image in our mind of a hard, often brightly coloured, some times clear, sometimes opaque, sometimes satin like gem of a sugar confection!

Old fashioned boiled sweets is an evocative phrase conjuring up images of jars of sugar jewels catching the sunlight that filters through the bow windows of a traditional sweet shop. But, exactly how old fashioned are old fashioned boiled sweets?

Evidence points back to ancient cultures such as the Egyptians enjoying sweetmeats like the original marshmallow but the expense of sugar meant 'sugar plums' were very much for the rich and for high days and holidays.

You may not believe it but the old fashioned boiled sweet is actually a 'super cooled liquid'. Sugar and water are boiled up to produce a clear glistening syrup, left to it's own devices this syrup will re-crystallise as it cools producing an opaque sweet. However it appears that by the 17^th Century, it was discovered that adding acid (lemon juice, vinegar, tartaric acid) to the syrup and cooling rapidly kept the hard brittle sweet beautifully clear and glass like. We still have taste for these sweet and sour combinations – think acid drops, pear drops and the Scottish soor plooms although the floral flavours also popular at the time are not so common now.

It was not until the happy combination of technology and affordable sugar (made from home grown sugar beet as opposed to transported from the West Indies) that the average Brit could indulge their sweet tooth in what we would now view as old fashioned boiled sweets. A huge success at the Great Exhibition of 1851 was a 'Drop' machine with interchangeable rollers to give a variety of shapes which introduced mechanisation of sweet making to an eager world! By 1865 Henry Weatherly had printed 'A treatise on the art of boiling sugar, crystallizing, lozenge-making, comfits, gum goods, and other processes for confectionery, etc.: in which are explained, in an easy and familiar manner, the various methods of manufacturing every description of raw and refined sugar goods' to an eager market (achieved at least 3 editions over the years!).

Fruit flavours were an instant success – think of those wonderful staples of the old fashioned sweet shop:- fruit drops, juicy apples, pineapple cubes. Medicinal or herbal sweets were also popular – the Victorians were great believers in self medication and many were a generation or less removed from their rural roots. Clove balls, cough candy, herbal tablets remain from those days – they may seem to be old fashioned sweets now but in only 150 years ago they were exciting and new. I have to say even now when I have cough or cold my first stop is to a good old fashioned boiled sweet like a mentholyptus – if nothing else the taste is so strong that it'll cut through even the most dulled taste buds!