These days we rarely make our own lollies or sweets as it’s so much easier to buy them ready-made. But in Nana’s day it wasn’t unusual to churn out a few barley sugars from the kitchen.
A few years ago I was asked by a New Zealand Woman’s Weekly reader to find her a recipe for old-fashioned mints. “They have no crisp coating on the outside and they melt in your mouth with a delicious mint flavour,” she said.
It took me a while but I eventually found a recipe and made them one afternoon. They turned out to be delicious little soft morsels, which were very delicate, and I could just see them presented in a little crystal dish after dinner at my nana’s house – or even on the set of Downton Abbey.
I make these often and I hope you enjoy them as much as we do. Barley sugars are an old-fashioned boiled sweet which uses barley more for the fl avour than for any health reasons. I made these after a very ragged piece of paper fell out of an old recipe book I was thumbing through.
It was in old-fashioned handwriting and I felt it had been used to make barley sugars time and time again, so I had to try it out.
Old-fashioned granny peppermints
Source peppermint essential oil to get the flavour needed for these. You can buy it at health shops and chemists.
Make sure the label says “essential oil”, which means it has come from a peppermint plant, rather than “fragrance”, which means it’s artificial and you shouldn’t eat it.
1 egg white
250g icing sugar
150g caster sugar
1 tsp peppermint essential oil
Fold the egg white into the icing sugar until stiff, then add the caster sugar and the peppermint. You should get a stiff paste – add more sugar until you do. Roll into little balls and leave overnight to set.
Barley sugars
90g pearl barley
Rind of ½ lemon
1.2 litres of cold water
700g sugar
Juice of 1 lemon
Put the barley, lemon rind and water in a pot. Bring to the boil and then leave to simmer for two hours. Set aside to cool.
Tip the mixture into a sieve lined with some muslin or fine cloth. Measure out 600ml of the strained liquid and put it into another saucepan.
Add the sugar to the barley liquid and put on a low heat, stirring until the sugar has dissolved. Bring to the boil but do not stir. When it starts to boil, add the lemon juice and boil the syrup until it reaches what is called the “soft crack” stage.
This means that when you drop some syrup into cold water it will solidify into threads, which you you can bend before they break. If they crack, you’ve gone too far and have made brittle toffee, which is still nice – just pour into a pan, then crack with a hammer when set.
Pour the syrup into a wellgreased sponge tin and, when cool enough to handle, use kitchen scissors to cut the mixture into strips about 5cm long. Hold each strip by the ends and twist to form spirals. Work quickly as you will only be able to do this before the barley sugar sets. Place on a piece of baking paper to harden. Enjoy!
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