Flagroot candy not so sweet for its maker

All of us here at the Shaker Museum suffer under the distinct disadvantage of never having tasted candied flag root, so can only preface this discussion with a comment Sister Marie Burgess (1920-2001), who  worked in the Shakers’ confectionery business for thirty years, made one day to our Director of Collections and Research in the kitchen at Sabbathday Lake, Maine. She said one of her least favorite jobs while a Shaker was making candied flag and that after all the disagreeable work she no longer cared for the taste of it either!

As the population of Shaker brothers declined in the last half of the nineteenth century, it fell to the sisters to develop and manufacture marketable new products to bolster the income for their families. The Shaker sisters at Canterbury and other Shaker communities prepared a variety of foodstuffs for sale: among them, candied flag root.

Sweet flag was harvested, cleaned, thinly sliced, boiled several times, and candied with crystals of sugar. The slicing, clearly the most tedious part of the process, was made easier by a special rotary cutter powered by an old Boston brand sewing machine. The sewing machine, given to Eldress B. King by her grandmother, was converted to a flag root cutter by the Canterbury brothers. They removed the part of the sewing machine that moved the sewing needle up and down and re-purposed the spinning motion produced by the foot treadle to power an attached four-bladed cutting head that thinly sliced the flag root. The tin-covered trough helped guide the root into the cutters and the sliced pieces were collected in a tin container at the front of the machine.The candied flag was packaged in boxes and sold in Shaker gift shops. It continued to be made at SabbathDay Lake well into the 1950s.