SC - Dragiees: A Speculative Experiment - Long!

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Morning, all! 

I thought people might find this interesting, especially the sugar
mavens out there. What follows is an account of my speculative attempt
to recreate a period candy. We have no real reason to assume the candy
existed in this exact form, but if I'm forgiven for working from such
secondary sources as Scully's "The Art of Cookery in the Middle Ages",
I'd say there is a fair chance that it did.  

In the course of working with the Terence Scully translation of
Chiquart's "Du Fait de Cuisine" (c. ~1420 C.E.), I ran across several
different references to an item known as a dragiee. A modern drageé is a
sugared almond, which are _also_ referred to in the text, but Chiquart
appears to be referring to a spice candy, used either as a garnish or as
a larger candy eaten out of hand in its own right. In its simplest form
this would be just a candied seed like the Anglo-Norman confit,
generally anise or caraway, classified as either red or white, and which
might or might not include artificial coloring. Roughly equivalent to
the candied fennel seeds one finds in an Indian restaurant. These would
likely be used as a garnish, but there appear to have been larger
dragiees, often found at the end of a great feast, generally served with
wafers, as a substitute for, or in addition to, hippocras, the spiced
wine cordial drunk after a large meal as a digestive aid. It occurred to
me that  there ought to be a way to incorporate the spices used for
hippocras into a dragiee, the spice combination being more or less a
medical prescription. So, what would those spices be? 

"To make powdered hippocras, take a quarter of very fine cinnamon
selected by tasting it, and half a quarter of fine flour of cinnamon, an
ounce of selected string ginger, fine and white, and an ounce of grain
of Paradise, a sixth of nutmegs and galingale together, and bray them
all together.  And when you would make your hippocras, take a good half
ounce of this powder and two quarters of sugar and mix them with a quart
of wine, by Paris measure. And note that the powder and the sugar mixed
together is the Duke's powder."

                	Le Menagier de Paris, ‘The Goodman of Paris’, c. ~
1393, trans. Eileen Powers, 1928.

The fractional measurements are probably parts of a pound, which would
make it pretty consistent with the proportions of other hippocras
recipes of the period. Which gives the following amounts:

4 oz stick cinnamon
2 oz powdered cinnamon
"A sixth" (probably of a pound - 2 2/3 ounces) of nutmegs and galingale
          mixed together in equal parts
1 oz of ginger
1 oz of grains of paradise

'and bray them all together', giving us roughly 11 ounces of mixed
hippocras spice, just over three cups.

Now the trick is to figure out how to incorporate the spices into candy.
My biggest fear was that powdered spices stirred into sugar syrup cooked
to the hard-crack stage (300 degrees F.) would immediately burn, which
is why modern hard candy recipes use essential flavoring oils for this
job. Try finding an essential flavoring oil for galingale or grains of
paradise, though! I thought of various infusions, and experimented a bit
with them, but without much success. I pretty much concluded that the
only way to do the job would be to use the powdered spices, since whole
spices, which would burn less, would be candied whole spices, and not
candied hippocras. The trick was to let the syrup cool down to a
reasonable temperature before adding the spices, and hope that at that
temperature the syrup would still be liquid enough to stir the spices in
properly.

So, starting with proportions based on a couple of different
cinnamon-sugar recipes, and a hard candy recipe from "The Joy of
Cooking", I boiled one cup of water with three cups of sugar
(substituting the third cup of sugar for the 3/4 cup light corn syrup
called for in the recipe; 3/4 cup of corn syrup weighing in at around 8
ounces) to 300 degrees F. on a candy thermometer. Various period sugar
recipes indicate that even without a good thermometer, there were ways
for period people to tell when their sugar was done, such as the nature
of the thread it spun, or how it would stick to wet fingers, etc. The
names commonly used, such as soft or hard ball, hard crack, etc., were
developed before the thermometer came into common use in making candy:
now you know where the terms come from. I was expecting a bit of trouble
with the simple substitution of sugar for the corn syrup, since it was
probably included to make the candy easier to work without excess early
crystallization. I must try this again with sugar and honey as a
substitute for the corn syrup, and let you know the results.

I let the syrup cool down somewhat, just shaking the pan slightly, since
excessive stirring will cause the syrup to crystallize. I was able to
get the temperature down to around 237 degrees F. before it began to get
as thick as I wanted to try stirring powdered spices (evenly) into. My
written candy recipe suggested leaving the main portion of the syrup in
the pan, on the lowest possible heat, while working batches of candy, so
after stirring in about six tablespoons of my spice mixture (which
brought down the temperature a bit more), that's what I did. That kept
the syrup at more or less an even keel, without burning it or destroying
the flavor. The other advantage was that when individual portions of
candy became too cool and hard to work, they could be stirred back into
the syrup to melt. The temperature never got much higher than 240
degrees F., which was enough to melt the mistakes without burning the
spices.

I tried forming the dragiees in various ways; most methods involved
pouring small amounts of candy onto a lightly oiled marble slab. I tried
spooning drops the size of a penny, which came out too flat. I also
tried larger puddles, roughly an inch across, give or take a bit, which
could be left to cool for a few minutes, peeled, while still soft, off
the slab, and rolled into a ball 1/2 inch in diameter.  The problem was
that this was extremely slow unless I dropped several puddles at a time,
and usually half of them cooled until brittle before I could get to
them. Finally I found that the best way to do it was to drop 2-3
tablespoons in an oblong ribbon about 1 inch by four, carefully lifting
the cooled long leading edge with an oiled knife blade, and folding it
over on itself repeatedly, until I had a rough six-inch-long cylinder
about 1/2 inch in diameter. I was then able to cut off pillow-shaped
chunks, a few at a time, which could be left as is or rolled into balls. 

Enlisting a friendly native six-year-old, we were able to get a 
reasonably good production line going, except perfect spheres were low
in proportion to egg-shapes, what with the kid hands and all. I'd
strongly advise you try several methods of forming yourself, before
allowing anybody whose hands can't take much contact with hot stuff to
participate. My hands are pretty well calloused, and don't burn easily,
and it was only when I felt that the rolled cylinder method produced
relatively cool chunks of candy that I allowed my son to hold them in
his hands. We stored our proto-dragiees in an airtight plastic box,
covered with lots of powdered sugar, another non-period convenience,
which we'll shake off in a sieve when we want to serve them. Rice flour
is probably what would have been used in period to keep them separate,
but since that too would have to be removed if used in any quantity, I
felt it made little difference. We got about 160 small bullets, roughly
3-8 to 5/8 inch, from our 1 1/2 pounds of sugar, and they're a bit like
cinnamon hard candies, except they taste, well, like hippocras.

Obviously this is a rather speculative approach. As far as I know, we
have no recipes for spice dragiees. We do have a few confit recipes from
period sources, but they're mostly for whole spices, which would make
the hippocras mixture difficult or impossible to achieve in a single
bite of candy. We are reasonably sure that hard candies, made from syrup
boiled to the hard crack stage, existed, so this is just one way they
might have been flavored and made.

Adamantius          

- -- 
______________________________________
Phil & Susan Troy
troy at asan.com
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