How to Make Candy: A Complete Hand Book for Making All Kinds of Candy, Ice Cream, Syrups, Essences, Etc., Etc

In Short

Published in 1891 by Frank Tousey, this anonymous instructional manual systematically covers the nineteenth-century confectioner's craft, progressing from the elemental mechanics of sugar boiling to the creation of molded bonbons, fruit pastes, medicinal lozenges, and elaborate spun-sugar centerpieces. It acts as both a practical trade guide and a mirror of late-Victorian domestic economy, detailing raw material selections alongside chemical colorings and herbal infusions. The work survives today as an intriguing historical document, capturing a period when commercial food production bridged the gap between traditional kitchen craft, early pharmacy, and unregulated industrial chemistry.

The Story

The manual establishes its groundwork by detailing the physical nature of sugar and its essential prep work. The process opens with instructions for clarifying raw sugar, using water and egg white alongside either powdered charcoal, ivory-black, or bullock's blood to strain out impurities. From there, the text introduces the central mechanic of confectionery: monitoring how water evaporates as sugar boils through distinct, named stages of concentration. A practitioner tests these stages through physical cues—blowing through a skimmer to observe the "feather," or dipping a stick into cold water to roll the hot sugar into a soft or hard "ball," and finally testing for the "crack" where the cooled sugar snaps crisply.

Moving beyond basic boiling, the guide introduces flavored hard candies, pralines, and chocolate. It breaks down the selection of raw cacao beans, emphasizing that blending specific regional varieties—such as dry Caraccas nuts with oily island beans—produces a superior chocolate base. The text then transitions into the art of food coloring, outlining methods for preparing vivid pigments like carmine from cochineal, sap green from buckthorn, and bistre from wood-soot, while noting that certain dark earths and bone blacks are reserved for items not intended to be eaten.

The text shifts toward specialized, molded, and decorative sweets. It describes comfit-making, where seed bases like caraway or coriander are repeatedly rolled, dusted with flour, and coated with sugar in a pan. It details novelties like brandy balls, striped peppermint sticks, and liqueur-filled drops. To create liquid-filled bonbons and sugar chains, the confectioner presses wooden or lead shapes into trays of dry starch powder to form molds, fills the indentations with boiled syrup and spirits, and leaves them to harden in a heated stove before painting or decorating them with fine sugar piping.

The scope expands further into fruit pastes, ices, and pharmaceutical preparations. Apples, apricots, plums, and quinces are reduced to pulp, combined with clarified sugar, spread thin on pewter sheets, and dried into sweet rings or knots. Frozen desserts follow, detailing recipes for fruit creams, custards, and multi-colored harlequin ices. The text then outlines the preparation of medicinal lozenges, blending sugar and gum arabic with active ingredients ranging from mild digestives like magnesia and nutmeg to potent expectorants like ipecacuanha and laudanum.

Finally, the guide reaches the apex of the confectioner’s art with sugar spinning and decorative icing. Sugar boiled to the caramel stage is spun from a spoon over oiled copper or tin molds to build hollow trellis-work baskets, vases, and fountains, while piped royal icing forms complex architectural structures like Chinese temples. The book concludes with preserves and jams, ending on simple household instructions for gooseberry jam sealed with egg-white paper.

How It Unfolds

The mechanics of sugar The text opens by explaining that sugar forms the groundwork of all confectionery, detailing how to clarify raw sugar with egg whites and charcoal or bullock's blood. It outlines the progressive stages of boiling, teaching the reader how to judge temperature using cold water tests and physical indicators like the feather, ball, and crack.

Flavors, cacao, and pigments The manual transitions to flavoring and coloring agents, describing how to balance Caraccas and island cacao nuts for rich chocolate. It provides detailed chemical recipes for preparing brilliant reds, greens, and browns using cochineal, alum, wood-soot, and buckthorn berries.

Comfits, drops, and novelties Instructions move to built-up sweets, detailing how to coat caraway seeds with sugar charges in a rotating pan and how to pull and stripe peppermint candy. It explains how to press decorative shapes into starch beds to cast liqueur-filled drops, rings, and interlocking sugar chains.

Pastes, ices, and lozenges The focus shifts to preserving fruit pulps into boiled pastes that are dried on tin sheets and cut into knots. It presents recipes for frozen creams and layered harlequin ices, alongside a range of medicinal lozenges containing ingredients like ipecacuanha, nitre, and laudanum.

Spun sugar and structural icing The manual reaches its climax by detailing advanced decorative techniques, instructing the reader on how to spin hot caramel into delicate trellis-work baskets and fountains over oiled molds. It concludes with methods for piping royal icing into complex structures and simple instructions for potting fruit jams.

The People

Because this text is a practical manual rather than a narrative, its "people" are the key materials, tools, and roles that drive the confectioner's craft.

• Sugar serves as the central agent of the book, driving every process. It demands strict observation from the workman as it transforms from raw syrup through various boiled degrees—the feather, the ball, and the crack—to become hard candy, spun decoration, or smooth paste.
• The Confectioner is the skilled human craftsman who must acquire efficiency through practice and physical intuition. He must judge exact boiling points by eye and hand, manipulate hot sugar on marble slabs, and master delicate decorative arts like piping and sugar spinning.
• The Assistant or Lad represents the supporting labor in the nineteenth-century workshop. He performs repetitive physical tasks, such as rolling hot cut sugar into small balls under his hand on a sandstone surface, turning up to eight or ten under each hand simultaneously.
• Pigments and Chemical Additives act as transformative elements that alter the visual and structural properties of the sugar. Ingredients like cochineal, alum, wood-soot, and gum arabic allow the craftsman to color, stabilize, and mold complex shapes.
• Medicinal Compounds represent the pharmacy side of the craft, where substances like ipecacuanha, magnesia, nitre, and laudanum are folded into sugar bases to turn simple confections into functional stomachics, expectorants, and cough treatments.

In Its Own Voice

"As sugar is the basis or groundwork of the confectioner's art, it is essentially necessary that the practitioner should carefully study and observe the difference in its qualities..."

The author opens the volume by emphasizing that mastering confectionery requires a foundational, scientific understanding of raw materials.

"Dip the skimmer again into the sugar, and blow through the holes as before, and the bubbles will appear larger, and stronger."

This physical test illustrates the traditional hands-on methods used to determine the exact degree of concentration while boiling syrup.

"Baskets, temples, vases, fountains, etc., are made by these means. It may almost be termed the climax of the art."

The manual describes the intricate practice of spinning caramel sugar over molds as the ultimate achievement in nineteenth-century sweet making.

What It's Really About

Beneath its procedural recipes, the book is about the mastery of physical matter through empirical observation, chemical transformation, and physical dexterity. It frames confectionery not merely as cooking, but as a precise technical craft that bridges culinary art, architecture, and domestic pharmacy. The text highlights how simple raw sugar can be manipulated into endless structural forms—from fragile spun-sugar fountains to dense, cast liqueur rings—by controlling heat, moisture, and evaporation. Furthermore, it reflects a historical moment when the boundary between food and medicine was fluid, showing how the same sugar-boiling techniques used for party bonbons were deployed to deliver potent Victorian remedies and herbal infusions.

Why Read It Today

This handbook appeals to culinary historians, modern pastry chefs, and curious readers looking for an authentic glance into nineteenth-century workshop methods. It offers an immersive experience, capturing the sounds, textures, and physical demands of a historic kitchen—from the snapping noise of boiled sugar at the crack to the rapid motion of rolling sugar balls on rough sandstone. Reading it feels like flipping through a lost trade notebook, rich with precise techniques that have largely been replaced by modern machinery and digital thermometers.

The book does present distinct difficulties for the modern reader. Its instructional tone assumes a baseline familiarity with historic kitchen equipment, such as stoves, sieves, and specialized molds. More strikingly, modern readers will notice the casual inclusion of toxic chemical compounds and unregulated remedies—including mercury lozenges noted in early editions, lead components for molds, and laudanum additives—which serve as a stark reminder of the period's lack of safety standards. Yet, despite these outdated practices, the volume remains a fascinating document of technical ingenuity and period craft.