tablet a Scottish sweet made from sugar and milk or cream boiled to the soft ball stage (116 °C/240 °F; see sugar boiling), and then stirred vigorously to make it ‘grain’ or crystallize. It is poured into trays and allowed to set before being cut into smaller pieces or ‘tablets’. The texture of this confection resembles crisp fudge. It was known in the early 18th century when purchases of ‘taiblet for the bairns’ were recorded in The Household Book of Lady Grisell Baillie (1692–1733), and Mrs McLintock (1736) gave recipes for orange, rose, cinnamon, and ginger tablets in the earliest work on cookery published in Scotland.
