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Dessert

Violets to Rock Candy

A candy made by boiling sugar and layering violet leaves, then baking until hard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Violets to Rock Candy

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Pick the leaves of the violets.

  2. Boil some of the sugar until it reaches the sugar stage.

  3. Pour the sugar into a tin candying pan about 3 inches deep.

  4. Strew the violet leaves thickly on top.

Set and drain

  1. Place the pan in a hot oven (400°F / 200°C) for 10 days.

  2. Once hard, break a hole in one corner to drain the syrup.

  3. Break the candy out and place it in heaps on a tin to dry.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

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

Sugar
Boils down to a hard, glassy candy that holds the violet leaves in place.
Violet leaves
Add floral flavour and colour, embedded throughout the set candy.

The step that matters

Boiling the sugar to the sugar stage. The sugar must be cooked to the right concentration. Too little cooking leaves the candy soft and sticky, while overcooking makes it brittle and prone to burning. This setpoint controls the final hardness of the candy.

“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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