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Chocolate Caramels (One and a half cups grated)
One and a half cups grated chocolate, four of brown sugar, one and a half of cold water, piece of butter size of an egg, table-spoon of very sharp vinegar; flavor with two table-spoons vanilla just before removing from fire. Do not stir, but shake the vessel gently while cooking. Boil on the top of stove over a brisk fire until it becomes brittle when tried in water; pour into a well buttered and floured dripping-pan, and check off in squares while soft. - Miss Emma Collins, Urbana.
A hard, brittle chocolate candy rather than the soft chewy caramel the name suggests today — there is no milk or cream in it at all. The temperature you pull it off the heat decides everything.
- The cold-water test"Brittle when tried in water" is the hard-crack stage, 300-310F on a candy thermometer. A drizzle into ice water should set into threads that snap rather than bend. Stopping short of that leaves a sticky mass that never cuts cleanly.
- What kind of chocolateGrated chocolate in an 1877 book usually means unsweetened baking chocolate, sold in hard cakes, though sweetened cakes were also on the market. Reckon 1.5 cups grated as roughly 6 oz of unsweetened chocolate, chopped or grated; sweetened chocolate or chips will make the four cups of brown sugar cloying and add cocoa butter and emulsifiers that change the set.
- Butter the size of an eggRoughly 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons.
- Why the vinegarA tablespoon of sharp vinegar inverts part of the sugar as it boils, which discourages large crystals from forming. This is the same job corn syrup does in modern candy recipes, and it is the reason the instruction not to stir matters — one scrape of a grainy spoon can seed the whole pan.
- The vanillaTwo tablespoons is a great deal by present standards, and home-made extracts of the period were probably weaker than commercial ones. With a modern extract you would likely want much less -- a teaspoon or two -- added at the very end, as the recipe directs, since the flavour is volatile and early addition wastes it.
- Shake, do not stirGentle agitation of the pan distributes heat without dragging crystals up the sides. Use a heavy-bottomed pan, and if sugar builds on the walls, wash it down with a wet pastry brush.
- Dripping-panA shallow rectangular roasting pan. A buttered and floured 9x13-inch pan works; buttered parchment is easier still. Score the squares while the sheet is still warm and pliable, then break along the lines once cold.
- YieldSomething over 2 lb of candy, depending on how thin it is spread. Store airtight -- at this sugar concentration it turns tacky in humid air.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) grew out of an Ohio church-society collection, and its habit of signing recipes with a contributor's name and town — here Miss Emma Collins of Urbana — is a record of how receipts actually circulated in the 1870s, passed between households and printed as received. That explains why the book carries several different chocolate caramel recipes with no attempt to reconcile them. The word "caramel" was applied loosely in American confectionery of the period to almost any boiled sugar candy cut in squares; the soft, milk-rich chewy caramel we now expect belongs to the era of cheap condensed and evaporated milk, later in the century. What made a recipe like this newly practicable was the availability of pressed chocolate cakes for grating, sold by Baker's and its competitors and stocked by grocers well inland, so that chocolate moved from a drink into the confectionery chapter of the ordinary household manual.