[Sca-cooks] Re: Spun Sugar

[Elise Fleming]

Adamantius wrote:
>I'm pretty sure the thread-spinning technique was used to determine  
>sugar-boiling temperature / candy state in some 15th-century English  
>recipes, but whether that was used in period as a construction  
>material, I don't know.

I would agree that it was used to determine sugar temperature in period.  I suppose some folk might say that if they could dip their finger into hot syrup and make a thread between thumb and finger that they could have extrapolated that to using an instrument to wave sugar threads around into a pattern, but one thing doesn't necessarily follow another - or we'd have had lots more inventions earlier on.  I haven't seen any evidence in English books, nor references to things made like that.  The "faulty translation" reference that Johanna gave was the only one I'd seen for "proof".

Alys Katharine