Hubble Bubble.....

Once the apples were washed, hand dried, stacked, impaled onto sticks and set aside, the production of the toffee would begin. I am sure it was as much a matter of safety, by trying to get as many of the younger children out of the way in the small kitchen, as it was of purpose. The smaller children were fine at the preparation work, but they would be in the way when the actual cooking was going. The promise of a cooled fork of toffee later (a fork dipped into toffee mix then dropped into cold water to test the setting of the toffee), would often allow a slight clearing of the kitchen as the older children and mother prepared the vast batches of cooked sugar, cochineal (the bright red food colour), hot water and a dash of vinegar. These ingredients cooked properly together and tested, would create the crunchy hard red coating around the apple. 

Once the cooking started, the kitchen was a dangerous place to be. When the various pots and pans on the old plate stove were in full production and the heat in the kitchen was getting serious (if you can’t take the heat get out of the kitchen… or if you were one of the younger ones “GET OUT OF THE KITCHEN!). Bags of sugar poured into our largest saucepans, to be stirred till they melted and with the right combination of colour, and application of bindings would form a bubbling hot, very dangerous mixture. This needed to simmer before being suitable to dip an apple. My mother and older sisters (forming the ‘coven’ of supervising witches – “We found a witch, we found a witch” as my brother and I used to say (another Monty Python favourite - but that will be talked about in another blog).

Speaking of witches, I wouldn’t doubt that some form of the Inquisition (although not originally purposed to finding witches I must add) would have included some form of burning of flesh. Either with heating irons, not the shirt iron type of course, although that could have been interesting. Imagine the Dominicans holding the heated iron against the sinner’s flesh, to have to stop and ask for a ‘hot’ one. But if I remember my history of inventions, the shirt type iron didn’t come along until mid 17^th Century and even then it was a bucket pan that held hot coals. So, either a metal (branding type) iron to sear the flesh, or, boiling pitch (hot bubbling tar), to pour over the skin of those under religious interrogation. I mention this as part four of the process of toffee apples is the dipping the apple on a stick (holding the stick end of course) into the bubbling toffee and draining it slightly before placing it (stick up), on a butter greased table top of our kitchen Formica table. This part of the process was where the most flesh was burned or seared or scalded.

(continued tomorrow)