Maple Candy
1 cupful maple sugar 1/2 cupful brown sugar 1 tablespoonful Crisco 1/4 teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful vanilla extract 1 cupful water Dissolve sugars in water in saucepan over fire, when boiling add Crisco and salt and boil until it hardens when dropped in cold water, or 258 degree F. Remove from fire and add vanilla. Pour into Criscoed tins. When half cold mark into squares. Wrap in waxed paper.
A straightforward boiled maple candy, from one of the Crisco-sponsored cookbooks of the 1910s. The only real technical demand is hitting the sugar temperature exactly.
- 258°F is the hingeThat is within the hard-ball range, and the recipe's own "hardens when dropped in cold water" test is the older way of reading it. Use a calibrated candy or digital thermometer; undershooting gives a softer candy that may not set firm, and overshooting tends towards brittleness.
- Maple sugarGranulated or grated hard maple sugar, sold in blocks and cakes at the time and still available from syrup producers. Do not substitute maple-flavoured syrup; if you use pure maple syrup instead, you are adding water and the boil will take considerably longer.
- CriscoThe book was published to promote it, so it appears in everything. Any flavourless solid shortening works, or use butter for a richer, softer candy — the fat's job here is to interfere with crystal growth and keep the texture short.
- "Criscoed tins"Grease a shallow pan; the quantities here make somewhere around three quarters of a pound of finished candy, so choose a tin that gives a slab thick enough to cut and wrap.
- Marking the squaresScore while the slab is still warm and pliable, as directed — "half cold" means firm enough to hold a line but not set. Once fully cold it will fracture rather than cut.
- Do not stir after boiling beginsThe recipe is silent on this, but agitation once the syrup is at temperature seeds crystallisation and gives a sandy result. Wash down the pan sides with a wet brush instead.
- WeatherBoiled sugar candies pick up moisture from the air and go sticky. Make this on a dry day and store the wrapped squares in a tin, not the refrigerator.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and issued by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening the company had launched in 1911; a tablespoonful of it turns up in recipes like this one where lard or butter would once have been assumed, and the branded verb "Criscoed" is a fair measure of how hard the advertising worked. The candy itself belongs to the maple country of New England, upstate New York and Quebec, where sugar was boiled down in late winter and the surplus pressed into hard cakes that kept all year; stretching expensive maple with cheaper brown sugar, as here, was one way of economising. The precise 258°F suggests the growing use of the candy thermometer alongside the older cold-water tests, and this recipe gives both.