Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 32.djvu/807

Rh, its yellowish color, and its extreme frangibility. The nuts and fruits used in the cheaper varieties are also of poor quality, being mostly worm-eaten, old, or damaged.

To return now to our boiled sugar, which we left in the half-cooled pasty or doughy condition produced by 250° of heat. A mass of sugar in this state is the common or basic material of all candies; it is the nodal point of the line, the focus of all the processes. Antecedent to this lump of waxy paste lies a held of waving, tasseled cane, and forth from said lump proceed the thousand fantastic and toothsome dainties that glow in the golden trays of the confectioner's window.

The candy is worked by placing it on a marble slab kept warm perhaps by steam (sometimes an iron plate at one end is kept heated), and having movable iron bars for sides and ends—like the chase with which a printer's "form" is surrounded. When cool enough to handle, the flavor and the coloring ingredients are worked in. Clear candies are run into pans or trays without being kneaded or pulled; but if a white opaque article is desired, the mass is pulled on a hook similar to those seen in butchers' stalls—pulled out, folded, and thrown back over the hook, and again pulled until it assumes a sufficiently white appearance. For stick-candy "A" sugar is used, boiled down with a little cream of tartar to prevent crystallization. The striping of sticks is a very curious thing to see. The operator takes from the warm mass of candy a portion which he colors as desired, then draws it out into long, coarse strips, pressing them into the main mass, which is then rolled into a cylindrical shape, and gradually tapered out smaller and smaller until it is of the diameter of a stick of candy; the mass then resembles somewhat a balloon laid on its side, with its drag-rope extended on the ground beside it. Now, the colored stripes (having been rolled up in the paste) have been drawn out with the rest and in proper proportion, so that they appear both in the inside and on the outside of the stick as stripes. Sometimes a slight twist is given to the long stick before it is cut by the scissors to the required lengths. The working of candy by kneading or pulling it on the hook separates the particles and increases the bulk, so that the youngster who buys a stick of white candy imagines wrongly that he is getting more for his penny than if he had invested in a clear stick.

Lemon and other drops are now made by machines, which consist of two revolving cylinders, with holes on each side so arranged as to come exactly opposite each other when the cylinders revolve; the movement of the cylinders forces the candy into these molds.

The flat, striated cream-sticks of the shops are made simply by working the candy very thoroughly until it acquires the creamy texture. Peppermint-drops are made of granulated sugar and water heated to the boiling-point (but not actually boiled), and afterward flavored with the essence. White molasses candy is made of "coffee C" sugar, mixed with equal proportions of sugar-house and New Orleans molasses, and