Vinegar Candy
Two cups sugar, one cup vinegar, one teaspoon water, one teaspoon butter. Flavor to taste.
This is a taffy recipe with the method left out entirely, on the assumption that any cook of the period knew what to do with sugar and vinegar in a pan. The ingredients are sound; what follows is what the original leaves unsaid.
- The missing methodCombine everything in a heavy saucepan, stir only until the sugar dissolves, then stop stirring and boil to the soft-crack stage, 270-290F on a candy thermometer. Pour onto a buttered marble slab or sheet pan, let it cool until it can be handled, then pull until it turns opaque and pale.
- Sugar ratiosTwo cups of granulated sugar is about 14 oz; one cup of vinegar is 8 fl oz. The teaspoon of water does essentially nothing and can be ignored -- the vinegar is the liquid here.
- Which vinegarCider vinegar was common in American kitchens of this period and gives a mellow, faintly fruity tang. Distilled white vinegar works but tastes sharper and flatter. Aged or wine-based vinegars are a less likely choice here, since their flavour concentrates along with the syrup.
- Why the acid mattersThe vinegar is not only flavour. Acid inverts part of the sucrose during boiling, which discourages the candy from crystallising into a grainy mass and keeps it pliable enough to pull. This is the same job cream of tartar or corn syrup does in other taffy recipes.
- Crystal controlWash any sugar crystals down from the sides of the pan with a wet pastry brush before the syrup comes to the boil, and resist stirring afterwards. One stray crystal will seed the whole batch and turn it sandy.
- "Flavor to taste"Add extract off the heat, after the syrup stops bubbling, or the alcohol carries it away. Vanilla, lemon or peppermint would all be plausible choices; a quarter to half a teaspoon is plenty against this much sugar.
- Pulling and cuttingButter your hands. Pull for eight to ten minutes, until the rope stiffens and lightens, then draw it into a long rope and cut into inch pieces with buttered scissors. Wrap each piece in waxed paper -- unwrapped, the candy is hygroscopic and will go sticky within a day.
- YieldClose to a pound of finished candy, since almost all of the 14 oz of sugar remains after the water and vinegar boil off; perhaps forty small pieces.
- HumidityAvoid making this on a damp day. Pulled candies pick up atmospheric moisture as they cool and will refuse to set firm when the air is heavy.
Vinegar candy belongs to the American taffy-pull tradition, a nineteenth-century domestic entertainment as much as a confection: sugar was cheap enough by mid-century for a household to boil two cups of it for amusement, and the pulling was work best shared between several pairs of buttered hands. Vinegar was the one acid every kitchen had standing by, cider vinegar in particular being a by-product of the barrels of apples that came into the house each autumn. Its role in the pan is chemical before it is culinary, and cooks who could not have named sucrose inversion may well have learned by experience that a splash of vinegar kept the candy from turning to sand.