Candy

By Time-Life Books

Book Overview

A part of the Time Life Good Cook Series, featuring techniques and recipes for making candy and other confections. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0809429136
• ISBN13: 9780809429134
• Release Date: January 1981
• Publisher: Time Life Education
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.13 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Time-Life Guide to English Candy

I was suspicious of this book because it so highly praised by people who never make candy. I was also suspicious because it is full of color photos showing various techniques; a good food stylist is no substitute for good recipes and well-written procedures. On balance, it is a good, but not great book on candy making in the home kitchen.The book is divided into two parts. The first part contains mini-lessons on how to perform candy-making basics, complete with detailed series of pictures. Note that this book was actually written in England, so the recipes have a decidedly British slant. The section entitled "Bright-hued disks of hardened syrup" is your basic hard candy, but it is never called as such as is described as simply a method for making lollipops. Missing is the wide variety of colors and flavors possible. Also curiously missing are instructions for using hard candy molds to make nice little shapes and lozenges of all descriptions. It has instructions for making barley sugar, which is unknown to Americans. It has hard to find instructions for making fondant and marzipan in the home kitchen from scratch. The section on tempering and dipping in chocolate is confusing, as two entirely different things-pure chocolate and summer coating-are kind of squashed together in the same procedure. Some of the procedures involve dipping chocolate or summer coating, but never refer back to section on tempering as reminder that the latter must be followed in lieu of the short description in the procedures on dipping. I also find basic the description of how to cook sugar to be inadequate. Being English cookery, a large amount of space is devoted to pulled taffy, and also to marzipan confections. The instructions for nougat are also faulty: if followed literally, the syrup will cool and harden before the egg whites are ready. Several elements are missing. Most important is the lack of safety information. The easiest way to end up in the emergency room at the hospital is to burn yourself with super-hot sugar heated to 300 degrees. You will not find a dissertation on the various types of sugars, syrups, or cooking utensils. Also missing is any information about the fancy copper sugar pot used in many of the pictures (which retails for about $125 last time I checked), or anything about how to care for or clean it. You must be careful about choosing the pot you use for cooking sugar, but this advice is missing from the book. You will also not find anything on apples dipped in soft caramel or fresh fruits dipped in caramelized sugar, both very popular American confections. The second part is a collection of 265 recipes gathered from many books and the four corners of the globe. The main problem is that the editor did little more than translate the recipes procedures and ingredients to their modern equivalents. The recipes were changed as little as possible to retain the original mood, but this also means that the procedures by and large