Cream Candy
One teaspoon butter, one pound granulated sugar, one teaspoon cream tartar, one tablespoon vinegar, one and one-half tumblers water; when nearly done, add one and one-half tablespoons of extract lemon. Cook without stirring, try it in cold water as you do molasses candy, and pull it until it is very white.
A pulled sugar candy of the taffy-pull sort, worked until it turns opaque white. The recipe assumes you already know the cold-water test and the mechanics of pulling; everything else is straightforward.
- TumblersA tumbler in this period is a drinking glass of roughly 8 fl oz, so one and one-half tumblers is about 1 1/2 cups (12 fl oz) of water. That is a wet syrup by modern standards and will simply take longer to boil down.
- The hinge: do not stir, and wash the pan sidesOnce the sugar has dissolved, stirring drags crystals back into the syrup and the batch goes grainy instead of silky. Brush the inside of the pan down with a wet pastry brush, or cover it for the first few minutes so condensing steam does the job.
- What the acid is forThe cream of tartar and vinegar invert part of the sucrose, which helps keep the finished candy pliable enough to pull and creamy rather than brittle. They are not there as flavourings, and leaving them out makes a grainy or brittle batch more likely.
- The cold-water test in numbersFor a candy meant to be pulled, drop a little syrup into cold water and look for a ball that holds its shape and is firm but still pliable -- the hard-ball stage, roughly 255-265F on a thermometer. Taken much past that it will set before you can work it.
- Lemon extractOne and one-half tablespoons is a heavy hand by current taste; a teaspoon or two is plenty with a modern extract. The recipe adds it near the end of cooking; adding it off the heat instead keeps more of the flavour, since alcohol carries it off in steam.
- ButterThe single teaspoon goes into the syrup, but you will want more for your hands and for the marble slab or greased sheet pan the candy is poured onto. Cool the sheet until it can be handled at the edges before you start pulling.
- PullingWork it as soon as it is cool enough to touch, folding and stretching steadily; the whiteness comes from air worked into the mass, not from any ingredient. Twenty minutes of pulling is not unusual. Cut into pieces with scissors while still soft and wrap them, or they will fuse in the dish.
- YieldOne pound of sugar gives a little over a pound of candy, enough for a large plateful.
Pulled sugar candy was the centrepiece of the candy pull, a standard nineteenth-century American home entertainment in which the cooling batch was passed between pairs of guests to be stretched -- which is why the recipe assumes the reader already knows how molasses candy behaves in cold water. "Cream" here is often taken to describe the finished texture rather than any dairy content, though the etymology is not documented: the acid, in this case both cream of tartar and vinegar, inverts enough of the sugar to keep the mass soft, and the long pulling folds in air until it turns chalk-white and short on the tooth. The same method survives commercially in the pulled cream candies still associated with Kentucky and Tennessee, and in seaside saltwater taffy.