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Everton Taffy
1 gill water 2 cupfuls brown sugar 4 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 teaspoonful vanilla extract Pinch cream of tartar 1/4 teaspoonful salt Put sugar and water into saucepan; stir occasionally until it boils; then add cream of tartar. Put cover on pan and boil five minutes, add Crisco and salt and boil until, when tried in cold water it will snap, or 300 degree F. Add vanilla and pour into Criscoed tin. Mark in squares when half cold, and break up when quite cold. Wrap in waxed paper.
A straightforward hard-crack sugar boil, with the sugar syrup carrying the whole dish. The only real skill is temperature control.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz, in American usage; the imperial gill is 5 fl oz. Either way the exact figure hardly matters here — the water only carries the sugar until it evaporates off.
- CriscoThe book was published to promote it, so the fat is named throughout. Any solid vegetable shortening works; 4 tablespoons of butter gives a better flavour, though it will brown slightly and the taffy will be softer at the edges. "Criscoed tin" simply means a greased shallow pan.
- 300F is the hingeUse a candy thermometer and trust it over the clock. Below about 295F the taffy stays tacky and pulls fillings out of teeth; much past 310F the brown sugar scorches and turns bitter. The cold-water test the recipe describes — a thread that snaps cleanly rather than bending — is the same point.
- Why the lid goes onFive minutes of covered boiling lets condensing steam wash sugar crystals off the pan sides. Skip it and one stray crystal can seize the whole batch grainy. The cream of tartar does the same job chemically, inverting some of the sucrose so it resists crystallising.
- Do not stir after it boilsThe instruction to stir "occasionally until it boils" is deliberate. Once the syrup is at a rolling boil, leave it alone; agitation at high temperature is the usual cause of a cloudy, sandy result.
- Brown sugarLight or dark both work, but dark brown sugar carries more molasses and may be more inclined to foam up the pan. Use a roomy saucepan.
- Marking and breaking"Half cold" means firm enough to hold a line but still yielding. Score with an oiled knife or bench scraper. Left too long, it will only shatter at random.
- Yield and keepingAbout a pound. Hard-crack candy draws moisture from the air and goes sticky within a day in a humid kitchen; the waxed paper wrapping is not decorative, and an airtight tin helps.
- Filed under EggsThere are none in it.
Everton toffee takes its name from Everton, now a district of Liverpool, and is one of the older named British sweets — the trade there is traditionally traced to Molly Bushell, said to have sold toffee from a cottage in the village in the mid-eighteenth century, a story repeated in Victorian guidebooks more often than it is documented. By the nineteenth century "Everton toffee" had become a generic name for a hard butter-and-brown-sugar candy sold well beyond Liverpool, and it crossed into American cookbooks with the spelling drifting to "taffy", which in the United States more usually meant a pulled sweet rather than a poured brittle one. Its appearance here, with shortening in place of the butter that gave the original its name and character, is a small monument to the purpose of the book: A Calendar of Dinners was issued to demonstrate that Crisco could stand in for butter and lard in every corner of the kitchen, confectionery included.