“I turns out with muffins and crumpets, sir, in October, and continues until it gets well into the spring, according to the weather. I carries a fust-rate article; werry much so. If you was to taste ’em, sir, you’d say the same. If I sells three dozen muffins at ½d. each, and twice that in crumpets, it’s a werry fair day, werry fair; all beyond that is a good day. The profit on the three dozen and the others is 1s., but that’s a great help, really a wonderful help, to mother, for I should be only mindin’ the shop at home. Perhaps I clears 4s. a week, perhaps more, perhaps less; but that’s about it, sir. Some does far better than that, and some can’t hold a candle to it. If I has a hextra day’s sale, mother’ll give me 3d. to go to the play, and that hencourages a young man, you know, sir. If there’s any unsold, a coffee-shop gets them cheap, and puts ’em off cheap again next morning. My best customers is genteel houses, ’cause I sells a genteel thing. I likes wet days best, ’cause there’s werry respectable ladies what don’t keep a servant, and they buys to save themselves going out. We’re a great conwenience to the ladies, sir—a great conwenience to them as likes a slap-up tea. I have made 1s. 8d. in a day; that was my best. I once took only 2½d.—I don’t know why—that was my worst. The shops don’t love me—I puts their noses out. Sunday is no better day than others, or werry little. I can read, but wish I could read easier.”
Calculating 500 muffin-sellers, each clearing 4s. a week, we find 100l. a week expended on the metropolitan street sale of muffins; or, in the course of twenty weeks, 2,000l. Five shillings, with the price of a basket, &c., which is about 3s. 6d. more, is the capital required for a start.
Of the Street Sale of Sweet-stuff.
In this sale there are now engaged, as one of the most intelligent of the class calculated, 200 individuals, exclusive of twenty or thirty Jew boys. The majority of the sellers are also the manufacturers of the articles they vend. They have all been brought up to the calling, their parents having been in it, or having been artizans (more especially bakers) who have adopted it for some of the general reasons I have before assigned. The non-makers buy of the cheap confectioners.
The articles now vended do not differ materially, I am informed by men who have known the street trade for forty years, from those which were in demand when they began selling in the streets.
A very intelligent man, who had succeeded his father and mother in the “sweet-stuff” business—his father’s drunkenness having kept them in continual poverty—showed me his apparatus, and explained his mode of work. His room, which was on the second-floor of a house in a busy thoroughfare, had what I have frequently noticed in the abodes of the working classes—the decency of a turn-up bedstead. It was a large apartment, the rent being 3s. 6d. a week, unfurnished. The room was cheerful with birds, of which there were ten or twelve. A remarkably fine thrush was hopping in a large wicker cage, while linnets and bullfinches showed their quick bright eyes from smaller cages on all sides. These were not kept for sale but for amusement, their owner being seldom able to leave his room. The father and mother of this man cleared, twenty years ago, although at that time sugar was 6d. or 7d. the pound, from 2l. to 3l. a week by the sale of sweet-stuff; half by keeping a stall, and half by supplying small shops or other stall-keepers. My present informant, however, who has—not the best—but one of the best businesses in London, makes 24s. or 25s. a week from October to May, and scarcely 12s. a week during the summer months, “when people love to buy any cool fresh fruit instead of sweet-stuff.” The average profits of the generality of the trade do not perhaps exceed 10s. 6d. or 12s. a week, take the year round. They reside in all parts.
Treacle and sugar are the ground-work of the manufacture of all kinds of sweet-stuff. “Hardbake,” “almond toffy,” “halfpenny lollipops,” “black balls,” the cheaper “bulls eyes,” and “squibs” are all made of treacle. One informant sold more of treacle rock than of anything else, as it was dispensed in larger halfpennyworths, and no one else made it in the same way. Of peppermint rock and sticks he made a good quantity. Half-a-crown’s worth, as retailed in the streets, requires 4 lbs. of rough raw sugar at 4¼d. per lb., 1½d. for scent (essence of peppermint), 1½d. for firing, and ½d. for paper—in all 1s. 8½d. calculating nothing for the labour and time expended in boiling and making it. The profit on the other things was proportionate, except on almond rock, which does not leave 2½d. in a shilling—almonds being dear. Brandy balls are made of sugar, water, peppermint, and a little cinnamon. Rose acid, which is a “transparent” sweet, is composed of loaf sugar at 6½d. per lb., coloured with cochineal. The articles sold in “sticks” are pulled into form along a hook until they present the whitish, or speckled colour desired. A quarter of a stone of materials will, for instance, be boiled for forty minutes, and then pulled a quarter of an hour, until it is sufficiently crisp and will “set” without waste. The flavouring—or “scent” as I heard it called in the trade—now most in demand is peppermint. Gibraltar rock and Wellington pillars used to be flavoured with ginger, but these “sweeties” are exploded.
Dr. Pereria, in his “Treatise on Diet,” enumerates as many as ten different varieties and preparations of sugar used for dietetical purposes. These are (1) purified or refined sugar; (2) brown or raw sugar; (3) molasses or treacle—or fluid sugar; (4) aqueous solutions of sugar—or syrups; (5) boiled sugars, or the softer kinds of confectionary; (6) sugar-candy, or crystallized cane sugar; (7) burnt sugar, or caramel; (8) hard confectionary; (9) liquorice; (10) preserves. The fifth and eighth varieties alone concern us here.
Of the several preparations of boiled sugar, the Doctor thus speaks, “If a small quantity of water be added to sugar, the mixture heated until the sugar dissolves, and the solution boiled to drive off part of the water, the tendency of the sugar to crystallise is diminished, or, in some cases, totally destroyed. To promote this effect, confectioners sometimes add a small portion of cream of tartar to the solution while boiling. Sugar, thus altered by heat, and sometimes variously flavoured, constitutes several preparations sold by the confectioner. Barley-sugar and acidulated drops are prepared in this way from white sugar: powdered tartaric acid being added to the sugar while soft. Hardbake and toffee are made by a similar process from brown sugar. Toffee differs from hardbake from containing butter. The ornamented sugar pieces, or caramel-tops, with which pastrycooks decorate their tarts, &c., are prepared in the same way. If the boiled and yet soft sugar be rapidly and repeatedly extended, and pulled over a hook, it becomes opaque and white, and then constitutes pulled sugar, or penides. Pulled sugar, variously flavoured and coloured, is sold in several forms by the preparers of hard confectionary.
“Concerning this hard confectionary,” Dr. Pereira says, “sugar constitutes the base of an almost innumerable variety of hard confectionary, sold under the names of lozenges, brilliants, pipe, rock, comfits, nonpareils, &c. Besides sugar, these preparations contain some flavouring ingredient, as well as flour or gum, to give them cohesiveness, and frequently colouring matter. Carraway, fruits, almonds, and pine seeds, constitute the nuclei of some of these preparations.”