Coloured Rock Sugar
Ingredients
Directions
Make the candy
Boil 1 pint of clarified sugar in a copper or earthenware pan over a clear fire until it reaches the crack stage.
Remove from heat and briskly stir in 1 tablespoon of icing until well mixed and frothy.
For colored sugar, mix in food coloring with the icing before adding it to the sugar.
Pour the mixture into a papered sieve or an oiled tin or mold.
Finish
Allow to cool completely, then break into pieces.
If you don't have icing, mix sifted loaf sugar with the white of an egg until thick, then use 1 tablespoon of this mixture.
Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.
Explore the science
What each ingredient does
- Clarified sugar
- Forms the candy mass that hardens into crystalline pieces as it cools.
- Icing
- Stirred in at the end to add froth and encourage a fine, opaque crystal structure.
The step that matters
Boiling to the crack stage. Sugar must reach the crack stage so that, once cooled, it sets hard and brittle rather than sticky. Undercooked sugar stays soft, while overcooked sugar can scorch or turn bitter.
“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.
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