Britain at Work
A Pictorial Description of Our National Industries

SWEETMEAT MAKING. 279 wells, is set aside to cool, or is put on a shelf with many hundred others in a hot-air chamber, according to treatment required. Cream sweets, fondants and the like, also result from moulds, but in their case india- rubber moulds are necessary. The cream, which is simply boiled sugar beaten into a thick mass by a sort of gigantic copper churn, flavoured, and tinted (with vegetable colour), is deposited by machinery into rows of little wells many at a time. A short while to cool, then the indiarubber trays are turned upside-down, and out jump the finished fondants. Sugar wafers have a little department to themselves, and a special set of implements is necessary for their evolving. Cocoanuts figure largely in the manufacture of sweets. They arrive at the factory in a ceaseless stream, never having time to do more than lie a day or so before they are seized upon and converted into some form of sweet. Armed with a hammer, a man knocks off the shell and throws the nuts into an enormous bin; out of that two women pick them and hold them against a set of blades worked by machinery, which deprive them of the hard brown rind. Then white balls are dropped, several at a time, into cauldrons containing paddles working rapidly in opposite directions, so that if a nut escapes being smashed by one blade it is caught by another, and before it emerges becomes reduced to very small pieces; a secondary process further “ pulps ” it, and the final touch is given by a grinder. Then the cocoanut is ready to be mixed with sugar and converted into “ ice,” rock, and all the other forms of sweetmeats of which it is the foundation. Sugared almonds and caraway comfits look to the inexperienced eye simple, unpretentious sort of confections ; but it takes an almond four days’ and a caraway seed six weeks’ incessant rolling in boiling sugar, poured on in very small quantities, to reach completion. The seed, or the almond, serves as the starting point, it being necessary that the sugar should hold to something. Having been given their preliminary dose of sugar, the caraway seeds or the almonds, as the case may be, are put into huge copper pans tilted at an acute angle; these pans are kept revolving, so that the sweets they contain are perpetually rolled in every direction. The noise made by thousands of almonds and twice as many comfits all roll- ing round the sides of the copper pans, and, when the incline gets too steep, suddenly falling, is enough to make speech in this neighbourhood futile. The effect of this mode of treatment in making almond sweets and their smaller varieties is, by constant friction one against the other and round the CHOCOLATE CRUSH- ING- MACHINE AT MESSRS. FULLER’S. the pan, they should acquire the desired sym- metry and equal size. This is a division of confectionery that needs specially careful watching, and is unusually slow of com- pletion. A speciality in the way of sweet preparation is carried on by Messrs. Mackenzie and Co., of Dalston. It lies in the fact that nothing is issued loose; every item is wrapped in thin paper ; packets within packets, every division in its own paper. The advantages of this arrangement will be readily apparent, the sweets thus reaching the consumer uncon- taminated by exposure. Butter-scotch, toffee, peppermints, almond cream, “ Fendean,” all share the same cleanly fate. Here we may see the manufacture of a popular variety of toffee known as “ Soutouma.” The in- gredients, brown sugar and butter, are first of all weighed into white enamelled dishes in a cool recess of the boiling-room, and white-garbed cooks preside at neat stoves. The boiled mixture is poured on to slabs kept cool by pipes of cold water passing