Sucket

The dish was a sweetmeat involving sugar plums and dried fruit or peel in thick syrup flavoured with ginger and other spices.^[3] The dried fruits themselves were called "suckets" or "dry suckets".^[4][5] Suckets were moulded to decorative shapes, and a red colour could be achieved by using the juice of barberries.^[6] The Elizabethan writer William Harrison disapproved of sucket amongst a list of other "outlandish confections".^[7]

Hugh Plat described a sucket made from lettuce stalks in his Delightes for Ladies (1602),^[8][9] with his recipe drawn from a work of recipes and domestic advice compiled from the 1550s to 1580s, now contained in the British Library in Sloane MS 2189.^[10] Gervase Markham published a recipe for suckets in The English Huswife (1615).^[11] A similar recipe was included in The Accomplish'd Ladies Delight, in Preserving, Physick, Beautifying, and Cookery (1675), a work published with an attribution to Hannah Wolley.^[12] Markham also listed wet, then dry suckets in a sequence of banqueting dishes.^[13]

From the 16th century, confectioners in Colchester made sucket from the sea holly that grew along the coast. C. Anne Wilson describes suckets made from such sources as valued as aphrodisiacs, and the industry as persisting into the mid-19th century.^[14] John Murrell's A Delightfull Daily Exercise for Ladies and Gentlewomen (1621) includes a method to sucket candy green lemons as a coridial for the stomach, and a recipe to sucket candy green ginger, green peaches, and apricots.^[15] Murrell suggested "succet of walnuts" for banqueting tables in English or Dutch fashion.^[15] A Closet for Ladies and Gentlewomen (1654) gives a recipe for walnut sucket.^[16] A manuscript recipe book owned by Constance Hall in 1672, held by the Folger Shakespeare Library, gives a recipe for making a cake, adding fruit and suckets just before baking.^[17]

As a dessert course, sucket was sometimes brought to the table in a silver sucket barrel and eaten with silver sucket forks. These seem to have been the earliest table forks used in England.^[18] Silver gilt sucket spoons and forks, and two conjoined sucket spoons and forks, appear in the inventory of Henry VIII.^[19] Some sucket spoons have forks at the other end to the bowl.^[20]

The combination of fork and spoon in one utensil is described by food writer Bee Wilson: with the fork end, sticky sweetmeats could be extracted from containers without dirtying the fingers, and with the other end, syrup could be spooned out. At times when confections became stuck in the teeth of diners, Wilson writes, the prongs were also convenient as toothpicks.^[21] Consumption of wet suckets was not restricted to the table, and were sometimes sipped from small dishes while walking.^[22]

As the term sucket became outmoded, the same confections continued to be made under names such as "conserve" and "preserve". Foods that would be understood as wet suckets continue to be sold in England, as jars of candied ginger that are imported from China.^[23]