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Molasses Candy
Two cups New Orleans molasses, two thirds cup coffee sugar, butter the size of a hen's egg.
This is a formula rather than a method — the book assumes the reader already knows how molasses candy is boiled and pulled. The proportions are sound; everything that determines success is left unsaid.
- Coffee sugarA coarse, hard-crystal sugar once sold for sweetening coffee, sometimes yellowish and only partly refined. Ordinary granulated white sugar is the substitute, measure for measure.
- New Orleans molassesDark, full-flavored cane molasses of the sort sold as table molasses, unsulphured. It is not blackstrap, which is bitter and will not set into a pleasant candy.
- Butter the size of a hen's eggAbout 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Nineteenth-century cookbooks used the egg as a volume gauge constantly; the figure is approximate by design.
- The hinge is temperatureMolasses candy lives or dies by how far the syrup is boiled. Hard-crack stage, 300-310F, gives brittle candy; 270-290F gives a batch soft enough to pull into taffy. Below that it stays sticky and will never firm up.
- Cold-water testWithout a thermometer, drop a little syrup into ice water. At hard crack it sets into threads that snap; at soft crack the threads bend before breaking.
- Vessel and stirringUse a heavy pan at least three times the volume of the syrup — molasses foams up hard as it approaches the crack stages. Stir until the sugar dissolves, then leave it alone to avoid graining.
- Cooling and pullingPour onto a buttered marble slab or sheet pan and do not scrape the pan out, as scrapings can seed crystals. When cool enough to handle, work it with buttered hands until it lightens in color, then pull into a rope and cut with scissors.
- YieldRoughly a pound and a half of finished candy.
Molasses candy was among the cheapest sweets in the American home kitchen, and pulling taffy was an evening amusement as much as a confection, done in company while the batch was cool enough to handle but still warm. Molasses, a byproduct of cane refining, cost a fraction of refined sugar through most of the nineteenth century, which is why so much American baking and candy-making of the period is built on it. The specification of "New Orleans" molasses reflects a real market distinction — Louisiana molasses was sold by origin and generally considered better eating than the harsher West Indian and refinery grades. Recipes this terse were common in household books, which often supplied proportions rather than process.