Britain at Work
A Pictorial Description of Our National Industries

SWEETMEAT MAKING. 277 extract of lemon is worked in. More kneading follows, and then when cool enough to have stiffened into almost a solid mass, it is pulled into long narrow bars and squeezed between metal rollers, the surface of which is stamped with little round holes ; the rollers are given a turn, the clough - like sugar mass fills every hole; another turn, and out fall the “ drops,” like a shower of very large hailstones. Other varieties are stamped out of the flat cake of material by metal sheets covered with divisions. After this treatment the fruit drops remain slightly attached to each other, and require to be divided by hand, an easy work undertaken by quite young girls, who are also kept busy filling glass bottles with these sweets, by means of large-mouthed funnels. In the nougat department we see machines “ whisking ” the scores of whites of eggs that go to its concoction, and standing beside them we notice the immense barrels of honey —honey from California—which, with pis- tachio nuts, completes this delicious com- pound. The ingredients having been amal- gamated, the nougat is laid in wire shelves to harden, and after a few days’ waiting it is submitted in long bars to a machine, which cuts it with incredible speed into the con- venient little blocks in which it reaches the public. In striking contrast to the inviting white- ness of the nougat is the aspect of tubs full of liquorice, which is capable of being manipulated by deft hands into a great number of forms, such as long thin “ boot- laces,” short thick cubes, sticks, drops, and “ worms.” A particularly ingenious machine —not unlike that popularly known as a “ mincer ”—is employed for the manufacture of the last variety. Having been filled with warm liquorice, the machine produces out of twelve small apertures twelve “ worms ” a quarter of a mile long ! Needless to say, their rash career is harshly checked by attendant work-girls before they have had time to grow to anything like this embarrass- ing length. Another division of sweet-making capable of infinite variety is the “ lozenge,” ranging as it does from the delicately scented cachou, through many grades of elegance, clown to the rampant peppermint ; but whatever its flavour, every lozenge is made in the same way—a sweet, pudding-like mass is taken from the slab where it has been alternately thumped and flattened, and is thrown on to an arrangement called a “ traveller,” which passes under a machine fitted with a set of punches, These, at each stroke, punch out a row of lozenges at the rate of some 1,500,000 (one and a half millions) a day, the surplus material between the holes being automatically carried off to be worked up again. Such things as jujubes, and the vast number of models of the order of the well- known “ bananas ” and so on, are classed professionally under the term “ gum work,” and demand specially careful manipulation. They are made in moulds, each separately, in the following manner: A tray is filled with starch-flour, the smooth surface of which is indented with rows of little hollows of the desired shape ; a cylinder filled with liquid sugar-stuff is allowed to drip into each little mould, and the tray, when covered with tiny