Cream Candy from La Cuisine Creole

This guest post is part of a continuing series written by students from Karen Metheny's Cookbooks and History course. Kate Watson documents her recreation of a recipe for 19th century cream candy.

I’ve never tried to follow a pre-1900 recipe before, but for my Cookbooks and History class in the BU Gastronomy program, I chose to recreate a recipe for Cream Candy featured in La Cuisine Creole, an 1885 collection of New Orleans recipes collected by Lafcadio Hearn.

Although it was very hard to decide on just one recipe to recreate, I settled on this Creole recipe for Cream Candy. I chose this because I enjoy candy making— I’ve been gifting my special English Toffee to family and friends every year at Christmas for the past decade, and I enjoy experimenting with new candy types. I also love creamy flavored candies, so I imagined that this recipe would fit the bill. 

I assembled my ingredients. Luckily, the measurements were relatively standardized:

2 pounds light brown sugar (I actually used dark brown)

1 “teacup” of water (I used a mug- when I measured, it was ~1 cup)

2 “tablespoonfuls” of butter (I used salted Kerrygold)

1 tablespoon vinegar (I used plain distilled white vinegar)

2 tablespoons flavoring extract (I used Nielsen Massey Bourbon Vanilla Extract)

I added all the ingredients to my enameled cast iron pot and turned on the heat. Adding everything at once felt strange, as I would usually add vanilla last, but maybe that’s why there’s so much extract?

The recipe specifically said not to stir, so I knew I was working with a traditional caramel (something I’d never made before- I’ve always “cheated’ and used recipes that call for a bit of corn syrup). I decided to use a technique to prevent crystallization, even though it wasn’t specifically mentioned in the recipe: a brush to wash down the sides of the pot as the caramel cooked. It was really hard not to stir the ingredients! I was nervous about something burning as it was so dark. 

When it came to a boil, I set the timer for 20 minutes and readied a jar of ice water, to test the doneness of the candy. 
After 20 minutes, my house was filled with the rich smell of vanilla, butter, and cooking brown sugar. 

At this point, it was at very soft ball stage. The recipe said that it would be ready when the candy is “cooked enough to pull” but I didn’t really know when that would be. I decided to cook it for a couple more minutes. I usually judge “doneness” of a caramel by color, but since this recipe used brown sugar, it was already so dark that it was impossible for me to judge. At about 22 minutes it had reached medium-hard ball stage, and I decided it was ready.

I poured the candy out onto a buttered rimmed baking pan. It was quite beautifully colored and smelled rich and delicious. 

It was also scalding hot!

It quickly developed a skin, and after around 5 minutes had cooled enough for me to move it around with my finger.

I took a small piece off the edge and began to experiment. 

The candy began to lighten as I pulled. It was actually pretty hard to pull- my hands and arms were tired after a little while. It was very hot at first, but cooled after around 5 minutes of pulling, and the strands started to break. I decided to twist it and cut it into pieces with kitchen shears. It never became light as cream, but it did reach a nice café au lait color. 

I still had the rest of the rapidly cooling candy to pull- it would definitely have been easier with a houseful of children to help me! I decided to pull the rest of the candy, all at once, before it cooled too much to work with. 

Although it was difficult, it was also pleasurably tactile to pull the warm candy. The repetitive motion reminded me of the repetition of kneading bread. As I pulled, the strands became beautifully pearlescent. The colors progressed from the very dark brown of cooked sugar to a rich mahogany color and looked almost like wood grain as I continued to pull. 

Unfortunately, I couldn’t fully pull all of the candy before it cooled to the point where strands began to snap, but I had plenty for my family and classmates to sample. I snipped strands into small pieces and wrapped them in waxed paper for my class.

These candies, to me, did not taste like what I would expect a “cream candy” to taste, though they were delicious. They mostly tasted like the rich tangy flavor of caramelized brown sugar, with some smooth dairy mouthfeel from the butter. The vanilla was only slightly detectable, but it did add a slight aroma. I couldn’t taste the vinegar at all, and I’m not sure why it was part of the recipe, although I’m sure that acid was needed for some scientific reason. 

The texture of these candies was unique and interesting. They were very hard when fully cooled- hard enough to shatter. However, when you put them into your mouth, they softened and became smooth and chewy (dangerous-to-dental-work level chewy, I wouldn’t give these to my grandmother without a warning!). The closest thing I’ve had before is the texture of a See’s candy lollipop- quite hard, so you can bite off a piece, but then also chewy inside your mouth. 

If I were to make this recipe again, I’d try it with different types of sugar- both light brown and white. I would also try to take it off the heat at a softer ball stage, to see if that would change the texture. I would add the vanilla after it was taken off the heat, as I usually do, though probably not 2 full tablespoons of vanilla. 

Creating a historical recipe made me appreciate the tremendous knowledge cooks of the time must have possessed. Although this recipe was “easy” and used few, simple ingredients, I did need to call upon my knowledge of candy making techniques to understand when it was ready. As I’d never made pulled candy, I was definitely guessing. I wasn’t able to fully process the candy before it cooled- it would have been much easier with a large family full of children to assist me with the pulling process!

Bibliography

Hearn, Lafcadio. 1885. La Cuisine Creole: A Collection of Culinary Recipes From Leading Chefs and Noted Creole Housewives, Who Have Made New Orleans Famous for its Cuisine. New Orleans: F.F. Hansell & Bro., Ltd. https://d.lib.msu.edu/fa/19#page/247/mode/2up 

Accessed November 10, 2019

Juliet Corson’s Boiled Rice-Dumplings

This guest post is part of a continuing series written by students from Karen Metheny's Cookbooks and History course. Ilana Hardesty details the challenge of making a historical recipe for boiled rice dumplings in a modern kitchen. 

19th Century Cooking in a 21st Century Kitchen

Let’s be honest:  there’s only so far I can go in simulating 19th century cookery.  I have a 21st century kitchen (literally; it was gutted and renovated, painfully, in 2017).  I live in a city, so I can’t build myself a wood-burning fireplace in which I can set things to the fire; I’ve got a Bosch dual-fuel range.  I won’t be terribly successful with “pounding” my spices, as I don’t own a mortar and pestle, and can’t at the moment justify purchasing one for the purpose.

On the other hand, in terms of other responsibilities, I’m pretty well equipped.  At the moment I’m nursing a husband with pneumonia, and fighting illness myself. I’m doing laundry (granted, in my modern washer and dryer), cleaning, trying to keep ahead of the falling leaves in the yard, and thinking about the 15 people due at my house for Thanksgiving in a couple of weeks.  Perhaps I should be making items from the ‘caring for invalids’ chapters so often found in historical cookbooks. I could use a strong cup of beef tea right about now.

Instead, I’m trying Juliet Corson’s “Boiled Rice-Dumplings” (Corson 1885, 463-464).  I wanted to make a boiled pudding, thinking that would be a better simulation than something in my electric oven.  And these dumplings seemed a bit out of the ordinary. Essentially, they’re baked apples, except boiled, and with a rice “crust” rather than pastry (sort of an early, sweet, boiled arancini?).  I wanted to stay away from a pastry because I’m terrible at making pastry even in 2019. I would surely fail an 1885 puff “paste!”

The recipe calls for six apples to be cored and peeled, and flavored by adding “sugar and spices” or “any good jelly or marmalade” into the tunnel left by the core.  The apples are then wrapped in a layer of cooked rice, tied up in a “pudding-cloth,” and boiled for an hour.

Trial 1 (Monday)

I assembled my ingredients, all purchased at the Watertown Stop & Shop.  I did not need to pick over or wash my River® Rice, of course. Without a grain length specified, I went with medium grain rather than long grain (figuring medium grain would stick together better).  The apples are locally grown. They are Cortlands – the smallest I could find; do they give apples growth hormones these days? – as a substitute for Pippins. I used cheesecloth as an approximation of “pudding-cloth.”  I suspect I’d have been better off sourcing muslin or sacrificing one of my kitchen towels to the cause. In this round, I went with the “sugar and spices” option, and mixed up a bowl of white granulated sugar with pre-ground nutmeg and cloves (none of the recipes I looked at for any puddings called for cinnamon, but many called for nutmeg and cloves).

I set the rice to “boil fast for twenty minutes,” then drained it “on a sieve” (well, through a sieve, actually).  

As that was happening I peeled and cored the apples.  Did I take refuge in my OXO peeler and corer? Yes I did!!

Then came the tricky part, where I was instructed to cover each apple with a half-inch thick layer of the cooked rice, somehow AFTER I’d filled the core with sugar!  Now I think of it, perhaps I was meant to have left the bottom of the apple intact. Instead, I devised an assembly that appeared would work, until it didn’t. I spread a layer of rice on my cheesecloth, wide enough in diameter, I figured, to be pulled up around the apple when I cinched the cloth.  Then I put the apple in the center of the rice, spooned in the sugar mixture, topped with more rice, and pulled together the corners of the cloth, to tie them tight around the rice-covered apple.

Unfortunately, I ended up with only enough rice to make four, not six, apples.  Did I use too much rice on each apple? It didn’t seem that way. Are today’s “small” apples even too big for the recipe (which actually calls for medium apples)?

Here they are, just after being put into the pot of boiling water.  They float!

There was no indication of what to do when they came out of the boiling water, so I set them on a rack to drain for a few minutes, and then gingerly opened one packet.

Amazingly, they held together!

And the verdict?  They’re odd. Not inedible, but not delicious.  Perhaps I was expecting/wanting something much more sweet and dessert-like.  The rice got more gluey, and so held together. And, while I haven’t investigated the science, I suspect the pectin in the apple helped it keep its shape during cooking as well, as happens with a regular baked apple.  The texture is almost doughy, and the apple sort of melds with the rice.

Next time, I may try (and I know I’m changing too many variables):

• Corson suggests adding an egg to the rice as a variant.  This would also, I think, help the rice adhere to the apple and hold together.  I might consider this.
• She also says to “use any good pudding-sauce with them.”  She has a variety of sauces in her Puddings chapter, any one of which would make the dumplings taste better.  I will plan on making a sauce.
• Try to spread the rice a bit thinner
• Use something a bit less open-weave than the cheesecloth I have
• Try a jelly or marmalade instead of the sugar and spices

Trial 2 (Wednesday)

The cooking gods are evidently after verisimilitude.  This morning, the coldest day since last winter, the furnace blew.  So, no heat and a pneumonia-sufferer to keep warm. And also cooking to do.

This round was easier, since I’d done it once, but no less fiddly.  Who had the time to surround these apples in rice and wrap them in muslin??  I made the recipe as written, and did not add the suggested egg. I used smaller apples, so managed to get five made this time around.  Still not the six the recipe says I’ll get, but closer. Also, after perusing modern recipes for baked apples, I did not use the apple corer this time.  Instead, I used a paring knife to cut around the stem end, then used a small spoon to scrape out the core and seeds, while leaving the bottom of the apple intact.

I cut up a cotton kitchen towel to use instead of cheesecloth, and that was easier to manipulate.  I developed a process where I just mounded rice around the apple, and manipulated it into place as I pulled up the cloth around the apple.  This time I tried a jelly – a homemade cranberry-apple sauce made with the leftover apples from Monday, sweetened with a bit of sugar and flavored with spiced boiled cider.  I will not manage a pudding-sauce, though I know a good sauce makes anything taste better.

These were not, somehow, as aesthetically pleasing (perhaps the color of the cranberry sauce was to, um, visceral?).  Also, the apples disintegrated a bit more this time. Though they apples were picked from the same bin, perhaps some other varieties ended up in the mix, and these did not hold their shape as well.

The verdict this time, from the class, was positive!  We all agreed that this is not necessarily a dessert, but might be a nice sweet accompaniment to, for example, a roast pork dish, with a fruit-based sauce.  There is work to be done in getting them out of their pudding-cloths intact, but it may be that the problems I had with that were because they had been cooled and then reheated.  Perhaps the rice had a chance to fuse to the cloth more than if I’d served them straight from the boiling pot.

Overall, this was a fascinating experience.  I was hyper-aware of the conveniences that I have that Juliet Corson and her readers did not.  But I was also hyper-aware of the cooking knowledge I have, and of my ability to infer and adapt with very little recipe detail.  I look forward to taking on this challenge again with other recipes, for myself!

Works Cited

Corson, Juliet. 1885. Practical American Cookery and Household Management. New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company.

A Taste of the Past: Real Shrewsbury Cakes 

Students from Karen Metheny's Cookbooks and History course are contributing guest blog posts about their assignment to recreate a historical recipe. The first of this series comes from Kaya Williams.

A Taste of the Past: Real Shrewsbury Cakes 

Consider this a recipe for adaptability: Take one 19th-century recipe and combine with 21st-century technology. Sprinkle in a nearly-forgotten deadline and a pinch of last-minute grocery shopping (be careful not to overseason with hustle). Place in a tiny and sparsely-stocked kitchen for one to two hours and bake until cooked through. 

It was a baking experience unlike any other I had encountered: a centuries-old recipe modified for the present day, with challenges and delights alike spilling out of the bowl. In the process of baking “Real Shrewsbury Cakes” from Priscilla Homespun’s The Universal Receipt Book (1818), I became hyper-aware of the ways in which my modern kitchen could compromise the integrity of the historical recipe. 

As soon as I began preparing the cookies, I realized just how historically inaccurate my kitchen could be, with anachronisms baked into this five-ingredient recipe. 

I deliberately selected a recipe whose ingredients would not be impossible to find, avoiding entries that featured rosewater, pearlash, or lively emptings. But as I ticked off the items on my shopping list, I began to realize that even though the ingredients were the same in name, they may not have been manufactured by the same process. The all-purpose flour I used was likely machine-ground, giving it a finer texture than flour produced in an older mill. 

Likewise, the butter I used was mass-produced and kept rather firm in refrigerated transport, making it more difficult to combine with dry ingredients than would have been the case with home-churned or locally-made butter. The “powdered loaf sugar” that I used — sold in plastic packaging at Whole Foods — is also a far cry from that which may have been available at the time the recipe was created; I imagine that my store-bought, pre-ground cinnamon from Trader Joe’s is not what the cookbook’s author had in mind when she called for “a dram of beaten cinnamon.” Without close proximity to a chicken farm, the eggs I used weren’t nearly as fresh as they may have been for a home cook in the 19th century who may have owned their own chickens.

Though my ingredients were lacking in historical veracity, the confines of my modern kitchen may have been the greatest influence on the recipe’s temporal accuracy. Nearly every tool I use for preparation was made of plastic or silicone — materials not invented nor used commercially until nearly a century later (Science History Institute, n.d.; SIMTEC 2016). My stove and oven are fueled by electricity, not gas or a wood-burning flame. And it was near-impossible not to glance at the digital clock on my microwave to keep track of time — a privilege in which no 19th-century cook could indulge. But my greatest historical inaccuracy was also the one thing preventing my recipe from disaster: lacking a kitchen scale, I used Google to find conversions from weight to cup and tablespoon measurements. It’s a tool no 19th-century (and very few 20th-century) chefs could use to ensure that their recipes would succeed, but if I was going to present the finished product to others, I knew I couldn’t eyeball the measurements and still produce something edible.

Nevertheless, some techniques were maintained if for nothing else than a lack of equipment, like hand-mixing dough (I do not own an electric mixer). Instructions to cut the dough using a wine glass were easy enough to follow, and though I didn’t have a rolling pin, a drinking glass sufficed to flatten the dough. Likewise, the parchment paper I purchased was unbleached and sold in cardboard packaging — not too far off from the quality and consistency of paper available in the 1800s. 

I also incorporated some of my own baking knowledge to ensure baking success; rather than combining all ingredients at once, I first cut the butter into the flour as I would a pie crust to avoid a sloppy, sloshy mess, and I knew that a 350-degree oven would be standard enough that it would bake the cakes through without burning them. (Whether or not it was actually a “quick” oven, I wasn’t entirely sure.) When instructions called for the dough to be rolled “out thin enough for an ounce weight of the paste to make a cake as large as the top of a breakfast cup or basin” or rolled out somewhat thicker to be as large as the top of a wine glass (Homespun 1818: 20), I reverse-engineered the measurement by first balling an ounce of dough and flattening it to fit the space, then using that as a point of reference for rolling out the rest of the dough. 

The greatest challenge wasn’t time or equipment but physical space: though the recipe’s ingredients weren’t outrageously proportioned, my kitchen is so small that I could not roll out all the dough at once. (Even rolling out half the dough at one time at the designated thickness began to spill over the edge of the counter). I also had to bake the dough in batches of eight on half-size baking sheet, as my oven is too small to fit a full-size sheet. 

Even so, the final product — two dozen pale, shortcake-like cookies — was a success by most metrics. Though I personally prefer a moister cookie (and thus found these “Real Shrewsbury Cakes” rather dry), several tasters with an affinity for shortcake found them tasty. It’s unlikely that I’ll return to this recipe again, but the relative ease of producing the recipe made me eager to explore the possibilities that await in the world of historical cookbooks. Perhaps the best treats aren’t the newest but the ones proven tried and true by time itself. 

Bibliography 

Homespun, Priscilla. 1818. The Universal Receipt Book. Philadelphia: Isaac Riley. 

Science History Institute. n.d. “The History and Future of Plastics.” Accessed November 18, 

2019. https://www.sciencehistory.org/the-history-and-future-of-plastics. 

SIMTEC. 2016. “The History of the Silicone Elastomer.”Accessed November 18, 2018. 

https://www.simtec-silicone.com/the-history-of-the-silicone-elastomer/.