Caramels
One coffee-cup sweet milk, one coffee cup molasses, one and one-half coffee-cups brown sugar; boil together fifteen minutes, then add a piece of butter the size of an English walnut, rolled in a teaspoon flour; in the meantime melt a cake of baker's chocolate and add to the other ingredients, boil until thick and add a tablespoon vanilla; try it as you do molasses candy. Pour it into square tins well buttered. When nearly hard cut it into inch squares.
A straightforward molasses-and-chocolate caramel from the era before candy thermometers. The whole recipe hinges on the cold-water test, which is the only real instruction for doneness it gives you.
- The hinge: cold-water testing"Try it as you do molasses candy" means dropping a little syrup into a cup of cold water and judging the ball it forms. For a caramel that holds a square but still chews, cook to the firm-ball stage, 245-250F on a thermometer. Below that it will not set; much above it and you have hard toffee.
- Coffee-cupA coffee cup in nineteenth-century American receipts is usually read as roughly a standard cup, though period cups ran smaller in practice, perhaps 6 to 8 oz. Using 8 oz throughout keeps the proportions intact: 1 cup milk, 1 cup molasses, 1 1/2 cups brown sugar.
- A cake of baker's chocolateThis is unsweetened chocolate. The weight of a "cake" is not certain and period cakes varied; one to two ounces is a sensible working reading, since much more against this quantity of sugar turns the batch bitter and grainy.
- Butter the size of an English walnutRoughly one tablespoon. The teaspoon of flour rolled into it is an old thickening trick and can be left out without harm, since the sugar concentration does the setting.
- MolassesUse unsulphured light or dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is far more bitter than what the writer had in mind and will fight the chocolate.
- The first fifteen minutesThat initial boil is not the finish, only a reduction. Expect a good deal longer after the chocolate goes in before the syrup reaches firm-ball, and stir steadily near the end, as milk and molasses both scorch readily.
- VanillaA tablespoon is generous by modern standards; home-made and period extracts varied considerably in strength. One to two teaspoons, stirred in off the heat, is closer to the intended effect.
- Pan and yieldA buttered 8-inch square pan gives caramels a little under half an inch thick. Score into 1-inch squares while the slab is still warm and pliable, as the recipe says, then cut through when cold; this batch yields roughly 60 pieces. Wrap them individually in waxed paper or they will fuse back together.
Boiled sugar candy was an evening amusement as much as a confection in a nineteenth-century household: something made at the kitchen range after the day's cooking, poured, cooled and cut while people sat around. "Baker's chocolate" here is plain unsweetened chocolate liquor pressed into cakes, used sparingly against a base of molasses and brown sugar, which were cheaper and more familiar sweeteners than refined white sugar. The direction to "try it as you do molasses candy" assumes the reader already knew the cold-water test by feel, an assumption that held until thermometers became common kitchen equipment.