Cream Candy
1/2 cupful water 2 cupfuls brown sugar 3 tablespoonfuls Crisco, melted 1 teaspoonful orange extract 1/4 teaspoonful salt Dissolve sugar in water in saucepan over fire, and boil until it spins a heavy thread, add Crisco and salt and boil until it forms a soft ball when tested in cold water, or 240 degree F. Remove pan from fire, add orange extract, allow to stand five minutes, then stir until the syrup begins to "grain." Pour quickly into wet tin. When half cold, mark into squares; leave till following day in a cool place; then break up. Keep in airtight tins. Sufficient for twenty small squares.
A brown-sugar grained candy of the penuche family, written for a 1910s promotional cookbook in which shortening stands in for butter. It is simple, but the whole thing turns on the temperature and on when you begin to stir.
- The hinge: stir only after it coolsThe five-minute rest is not optional. Stirring syrup while it is still very hot throws large, gritty crystals; letting it cool before agitating gives the finer grain that makes the candy creamy. Modern fudge practice cools much further than five minutes would allow, so judge by feel and appearance rather than treating the five minutes as a fixed temperature.
- 240F is the number that matters"Spins a heavy thread" is usually given as roughly 230-235F and "soft ball" as 235-245F, so the two tests in the original are only a few degrees apart. Note that the thread stage is when the recipe has you add the Crisco and salt, so it still marks a step; the final figure to cook to is 240F, and going well past it will give a harder, drier square.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening, new and heavily advertised when this book was written. An equal amount of unsalted butter can be substituted.
- Brown sugarPeriod brown sugar was less refined and more variable than today's. Light brown gives a mild caramel note; dark brown makes a much stronger, almost molasses-heavy candy. Pack it firmly when measuring.
- "Wet tin"A shallow metal pan rinsed with cold water and not dried, so the candy releases. A buttered 8-inch square pan or one lined with parchment does the same job with less fuss.
- Orange extractAdded off the heat because the alcohol and volatile oils would boil away otherwise. A teaspoon is assertive; a half teaspoon plus a little grated orange zest gives a cleaner flavour.
- Marking and breakingScore the squares while the slab is still warm enough to yield to a knife but firm enough to hold a line. Overnight in a cool dry place lets it finish setting; a refrigerator makes it sticky.
- Yield and keepingTwenty small squares, about a pound of candy. Stored airtight with parchment between layers it keeps a week or two; humidity is the enemy, not time.
This comes from a Crisco cookbook, one of a group of recipe books Procter & Gamble commissioned after introducing the hydrogenated shortening in 1911 to teach cooks to reach for it in place of butter and lard — which is why shortening turns up in a candy where butter would be the obvious choice. The candy itself belongs to the American penuche and brown-sugar fudge family, sweets built on the same principle as fondant: boil a sugar syrup to soft ball, cool it undisturbed, then agitate it so it crystallises fine and smooth rather than coarse. Before household thermometers were common, cooks judged the stages by eye and hand — thread, soft ball, hard ball, crack — and recipes like this one, which gives both the old test and the figure 240F, catch the moment when the two systems overlapped in print.