small round confections originally made by ‘dropping’ a mixture in rounds to set. In common with words such as kisses and laddu (Hindi) the word describes a shape rather than a recipe. Acid, fruit, and gum drops are all still produced. Chocolate is also made into drops, as are cake and biscuit mixtures, e.g. sponge drops.
Acid drops (a contraction of acidulated drops) are small clear sweets made from sugar boiled to the hard crack stage (see sugar boiling), with the addition of tartaric acid to give a sour flavour. Fruit drops are similar confections, highly coloured, flavoured with natural or synthetic essences. Pear drops are a popular British sweet, coloured half-red, half-yellow, roughly pear shaped and flavoured with jargonelle pear essence, or synthetic pentyl acetate.
All these are descended from earlier fruit confections. Recipes which would have produced something close to a modern conception of fruit drops were given by La Varenne in Le Parfait Confiturier (1667). Acid juices such as lemon or pomegranate were added to boiled sugar. The acid had the desirable effect of keeping the sugar mixture clear and hard when it cooled, instead of ‘graining’, i.e. recrystallizing to granulated sugar. Other drop recipes called for powdered sugar mixed with fruit juices, giving a result similar to icing. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, extra acid in the form of vinegar or tartaric acid (or in one recipe oil of vitriol, sulphuric acid), were added to boiled sugar, and modern drops evolved.
Other flavourings included coffee, and perfumes such as rose, violet, and bergamot. The latter survives as a French regional speciality, bergamottes de Nancy. Peppermint is still used as a flavouring in Britain. Overtly medicinal ingredients, such as horehound, wintergreen, and liquorice, turned the confections into cough drops. Paregoric, added to some cough drops, originally referred to a camphorated opium compound, now reduced to a harmless flavouring.
Boiled sugar drops are usually made into attractive and varied shapes by putting the mixture, whilst still warm, through ‘drop rollers’ which both shape and cut the mixture.
‘Gum’ drops and ‘jelly’ drops rely on gelling agents for their textures and are shaped by starch moulding.
Laura Mason has written about several aspects of British food in books including Sugar Plums and Sherbet (1998), Farmhouse Cookery (2005), and Traditional Foods of Britain (1999), which she co-authored with Catherine Brown.
