Home › Candies › Clear Almond Taffy
Clear Almond Taffy
4 cupfuls sugar 1 cupful Crisco Pinch cream of tartar 1 cupful water 2 cupfuls almonds 1/2 teaspoonful almond extract 1/4 teaspoonful salt Blanch, split, and bake almonds to golden brown. Crisco a tin, and sprinkle almonds on it split side down. Dissolve sugar and water together in saucepan, add Crisco, salt, and cream of tartar, and boil until when tested in cold water it will be brittle, or 300 degree F. Add almond extract and pour over nuts. When firm, cut in squares.
Sufficient for one large pan.
A straightforward hard-crack candy: the only real variables are the sugar temperature and how quickly you move once it comes off the heat. Read the whole method before you start, because there is no pausing at the pouring stage.
- Crisco means shorteningCrisco is solid vegetable shortening, and any modern all-vegetable shortening works. Butter will also work but adds water and milk solids, which changes the set and the flavour; if you use it, clarify it first.
- The temperature is the recipe300F is the low end of hard crack. Below about 295F the taffy stays tacky and chews; much above 310 to 320F it begins to darken and can taste scorched. Use a calibrated candy thermometer rather than the cold-water test if you have one, and check it in boiling water first.
- Cream of tartar's jobThe pinch of acid inverts some of the sucrose as it boils, which is what keeps the finished sheet clear rather than cloudy and grainy. Do not leave it out, and do not stir the syrup after it comes to the boil — wash sugar crystals off the pan sides with a wet brush instead.
- Blanching and toasting the almondsCover the almonds with boiling water for a minute, slip the skins, split them along the natural seam, then bake until golden brown. The recipe gives no oven temperature; a moderate oven, about 350F for 8 to 10 minutes, will do it. They will darken further under the hot syrup, so pull them a shade early.
- "Crisco a tin"Grease a rimmed sheet pan, roughly a half-sheet, and grease it generously; this candy grips. A silicone mat or greased parchment is easier still. Warm the pan slightly so the syrup spreads before it seizes.
- Cutting while warm"When firm" is a narrow window. Score the sheet into squares with an oiled knife or bench scraper while it is still pliable, about five to ten minutes after pouring, then snap along the lines once cold. Left to set fully, it will shatter at random.
- Adding the extractAlcohol-based almond extract will spit when it hits 300F syrup. Take the pan off the heat, stand back, and stir it in quickly — the flavour is largely lost if you add it earlier over the flame.
- Yield and keepingThe quantities here come to nearer three pounds of finished candy, so 'one large pan' means a generous sheet. Store in an airtight tin with parchment between the layers; humidity will make the surface sticky within a day otherwise.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre that flourished in the early twentieth century: the cookbook published by a manufacturer to sell an ingredient. Procter & Gamble introduced Crisco in 1911 as a hydrogenated cottonseed shortening, and the recipe collections that followed put it into everything, which is why a cupful of it appears here in a boiled-sugar confection where a nineteenth-century cook would have used butter or nothing at all. The fat does have a purpose — it shortens the set and keeps the taffy from welding itself to the teeth — but the enthusiasm of the measurement is commercial as much as culinary. The dish itself is a plain hard-crack almond toffee, close kin to the nut brittles and the French nougatine tradition.