Taffy
Two cups sugar, one-half cup vinegar, one-half cup water, a piece of butter the size of an egg.
This is an ingredient list rather than a method — the book assumes any cook knows what to do with a boiling sugar syrup. The proportions are sound; the technique is all in the temperature and the pulling.
- The hinge: cook to 265–270FThe book gives no temperature; in practice pulled taffy wants the top of hard-ball to the start of soft-crack, roughly 265–270F on a candy thermometer. Under that it will never firm up and stays a sticky mass; taken well past soft-crack toward 300F it turns brittle and snaps instead of stretching.
- Butter the size of an eggRoughly 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. Nineteenth-century books often measured fat by comparison to eggs and nuts of various sizes, the egg being at the larger end of the scale.
- What the vinegar is forThe acid inverts part of the sucrose as it boils, which keeps the syrup from crystallising into grainy candy. Cider or plain white vinegar both work; do not substitute a heavily flavoured one, as a half cup is enough to taste.
- Do not stir after it boilsStir only until the sugar dissolves, then leave it alone. Agitation and stray sugar crystals on the pan wall are what turn taffy sandy — wash the sides down with a wet brush if you see crystals forming.
- Pouring and coolingPour onto a buttered marble slab or a heavily buttered rimmed sheet pan. Let it cool until you can handle the edges, fold them toward the middle, and begin pulling as soon as it can be touched — waiting too long leaves it too stiff to work.
- PullingButter your hands, stretch to about arm's length, fold back on itself, and repeat for 10 to 15 minutes. The candy goes from translucent amber to opaque and pale as air works in; that colour change is the signal to stop.
- Cutting and keepingTwist the pulled rope into a long strand, cut into inch pieces with buttered scissors, and wrap each in waxed paper. Taffy absorbs moisture and will slump in a humid kitchen, so store it airtight.
- YieldRoughly a pound of finished candy, since the two cups of sugar alone weigh about 14 oz and most of the water and vinegar boils away.
Taffy pulls were social events as much as cookery: a pan of boiled sugar was cheap, took no special equipment, and gave a roomful of young people something to do with their hands on a winter evening. The vinegar-and-water formula is one of the oldest and plainest versions, predating the corn syrup that later took over the same job of preventing crystallisation; molasses taffy was its darker sibling and is more often remembered now under the New England name of "molasses candy." The word taffy itself is generally traced to British dialect usage of the early nineteenth century, where it applied broadly to boiled sugar sweets, and its relation to "toffee" is close but has never been settled.