Flax Seed Candy

 I approach older recipes with some caution, due to the fact that all of the recipe info may not be written down. Sometimes, they would just put the minimum details, and neglect writing down things the cook assumes everyone knows already about how to work with a particular ingredient.

This recipe is found handwritten, tucked inside an 1882 cookbook: "Cuisine, A Collection of Family Receipts" collected by "Ladies of Bangor."  Haha! Makes me want to go weed all the slips of paper tucked into cookbooks in our kitchen, and properly organize them!

It calls for brown sugar, flax seed, and slippery elm. For the life of me, I cannot find slippery elm as a stand-alone item. Sure, it is an ingredient in tea, but there are other ingredients mixed in with the tea, so that wouldn't work.  And so, I decided to do a little research on flax seeds and candy recipes.

Athenaeus of Naucratic, an ancient Greek food writer, recorded a sweet called chrysocolla, found in writings by a poet named Alcman, who lived in the 7th century BCE. Crysocolla means "gold glue." It was a sweet made with honey and flaxseed. The recipe I found that seemed close to our 1882 recipe is this: equal amounts of honey and flaxseeds, with a little olive oil to coat the dish into which you pour the mixture.  So, honey substitutes for the brown sugar. And we simply don't need the slippery elm.

I toasted the flaxseeds. In case you've never tried this, it is a treat in itself! The little darlings, when heated, start to jump all over the pan! They began to jump well before the 5 minutes of stirring over medium heat was up, so I had tiny little seeds landing all over the stove and vicinity! Kind of reminds me of those poprock candies from when I was a child, exploding all over your mouth.

I brought the honey to a boil, poured in the toasted flaxseeds, turned the heat to simmer, and cooked the flaxseeds and honey, stirring regularly, for 15 minutes. Then poured it into a small, oiled rectangular glass dish and refrigerated for an hour. It was solidifying, but not too much, such that I could take a butter knife and cut it into small pieces. After an additional hour, it was fairly solid. 

Taste test: ummm, tastes like toasted flax seed with honey. It's really a very healthy sweet. And I imagine in the 7th century BCE, it would have been something special. Indeed, my experiment with this recipe inspired my husband to pick up ingredients to make one of our favorite sweets: baklava! Sorry, no recipe for baklava in this cookbook, therefore, no review here. But do enjoy this ancient sweet. Everything truly tastes better with honey!