SC - Making Comfits

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Bethany Public Library wrote:
> 
> I recall someone else making comfits and sharing their process (involved a
> marble slab), and I think it was the hugh plat recipe. Adamantius, maybe?
> Anybody remember?

I don't remember a marble slab being involved. I worked with a sort of
synthesis of the MS Royal (I think; the book is not handy just now)
found in the Goud Kokery volume of Curye On Ingslysche, with the Hugh
Plat recipe to fill in the gaps in detail.
 
> At any rate, I found that I *could* mingle them with my hand quite
> successfully, if the syrup cooled a slight bit, the ladle was small-ish, the
> syrup was poured sparingly, and was poured from a great height as the recipe
> advises. But my comfits are fairly "rough" and uneven in size. I'm going to
> make more tonight or tomorrow, and try the colored varieties.

Kewl! As I recall, I also could mingle them with my hands (kinda like
handling warm gravel), and used a small ladle the mountaynence of an
unce, as the recipe specifies. In other words, I happened to have a
one-fluid-ounce sauce ladle on hand. I also experienced rough and ragged
comfits, and after a certain size was achieved after multiple coatings,
I had the experience of forming sugar lumps without seeds in the middle;
essentially the comfits refused to grow larger (the recipe says they
should be the size of peas) after a certain point, no matter how much
sugar I added.

Also worthy of noting is the fact that I never actually had a real
syrup, so to speak. The fifteenth-century recipe never actually mentions
water in any way, and what I had done was melt the dry sugar, slowly and
gently, so what I had was essentially a hard-crack syrup from the very
start. This may have been the source of my problem.

So mine ended up looking a bit like ground-up concrete pellets, a bit
like Post Grape-Nuts cereal. They tasted like Good-N-Plenty candies.
People enjoyed them; I'm just not sure how close to the genuine article
they were.

Adamantius
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com