Ratings1
Average rating3
This is a candy cookbook with a story. The story is not that interesting, which makes me give it only 3 stars. It was published in 1918, but written before the Great War - the war isn't mentioned in the story, but in both the foreword and a small appendix with recipes using less sugar, so that most of the sugar can be used by the army. The recipes are as one would expect, your ordinary hard candy, caramels, fudges, fondant, and sugared fruits and nuts. There's also quite a lot of popcorn recipes.
And they repeat everything for every recipe because as Betsey says, it's easier to have the whole recipe on its own page so that one doesn't need to go back to find the “mother recipe”. But there's like over 40 fudge recipes and most of them say “After beating the fudge until it was as thick as heavy cream, Betsey poured it into the buttered pan and marked in squares”. After the fifth, it was getting irritating. After the 20th I felt like screaming :-D
The story is about a little girl who loves candy, but her mother doesn't like her eating the cheap penny candy one buys from a candy store because one doesn't know what ingredients they have used and the bright colors are not good for children. One day, her friends and she are discussing what they want to do when they grow old, and she says she wants to become a domestic science teacher. Her mother is very pleased to hear this and tells her she doesn't need to wait until she is old enough to go to college, and teaches her how to make candy. And this is basically her notebook where she wrote all the recipes and other information. Then there are some stories about events during the year where she made special candies etc. It's actually a surprisingly long story considering it's a very short book and there are many recipes.