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Dessert

Coloured Rock Sugar

A confection made by boiling clarified sugar to the crack stage, then mixing with icing or egg white, optionally colored.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Coloured Rock Sugar

Ingredients

Directions

Make the rock sugar

  1. Boil 1 pint of clarified sugar in a copper or earthenware pan over a clear fire until it reaches the crack stage.

  2. Remove from heat and briskly stir in 1 tablespoon of icing until well mixed and frothy.

  3. Pour the mixture into a papered sieve or an oiled tin or mold.

  4. Allow to cool completely, then break into pieces.

Prepare the icing substitute

  1. If you don't have icing, mix sifted loaf sugar with 1 egg white until thick, then use 1 tablespoon of this mixture.

  2. If desired, add coloring to the icing before mixing it with the sugar.

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

Clarified sugar
Forms the crystalline candy base that hardens as it cools.
Icing
Stirred in at the end to create a frothy mixture that helps form the rock texture.

The step that matters

Boil to the crack stage. Sugar must reach the crack stage so that, once cooled, it sets hard and brittle rather than sticky. Stirring in the icing after removing it from heat keeps the mixture frothy and opaque.

“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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