Home › Confectionery › Everton Ice-Cream Candy
Everton Ice-Cream Candy
Squeeze the juice of one large lemon into a cup. Boil ore and one-half pounds moist white sugar, two ounces butter, one and a half tea-cups water, together with half the rind of the lemon, and when done (which may be known by its becoming quite crisp when dropped into cold water) set aside till the boiling has ceased, and then stir in the juice of the lemon, butter a dish and pour in about an inch thick. When cool take out peel (which may be dried), pull until white, draw out into sticks and check about four inches long with a knife. If you have no lemons, take two table-spoons vinegar and two tea-spoons lemon extract. The fire must be quick and the candy stirred all the time. - Mrs. J. S. R.
A pulled lemon toffee, worked until it turns opaque and pale — the "ice-cream" in the name refers to that creamy white colour, not to anything frozen. The whole thing hinges on cooking the syrup to hard-crack and then handling it fast.
- The hard-crack test, in numbers"Quite crisp when dropped into cold water" corresponds to what is now called hard crack, roughly 300-310F on a thermometer. Cooked much short of that the candy stays tacky and will not hold a pulled stick.
- "Boil ore" is a typographical slipThe original reads "boil ore and one-half pounds moist white sugar" — read it as one and a half pounds, which the rest of the proportions support.
- Moist sugarNineteenth-century "moist" sugar was a soft, slightly damp refined sugar, closer to today's light-brown or golden caster sugar than to modern granulated. Plain granulated works and gives a cleaner colour.
- Tea-cupThe tea-cup of this period is not the modern standardised cup, and its size varied. Read "one and a half tea-cups" as a scant cup and a half of water; a little extra water only means a longer boil.
- Stirring and grainingThe instruction to stir constantly over a quick fire suits a shallow pan and butter that would otherwise scorch, but stirring after the sugar dissolves invites crystals. Wash the pan sides down with a wet brush and stir gently rather than vigorously once it is at a rolling boil.
- Why the juice goes in lastAdding the juice off the heat keeps its flavour and aroma, which would largely cook away over a long boil.
- PullingLet the slab cool until it can be handled with buttered hands or in buttered gloves; it is still very hot when it looks set, and pulled sugar burns are serious. Work it until it lightens and goes satiny, then rope it out and score across at four inches while still pliable.
- WeatherHard candy takes up moisture from the air and turns sticky. Make it on a dry day and store the sticks in an airtight tin between layers of waxed paper.
- YieldAbout a pound and a half of finished candy, or roughly two dozen four-inch sticks.
Everton toffee takes its name from Everton, now a district of Liverpool, where a butter-and-sugar toffee was sold from the eighteenth century onward and became well enough known that "Everton" functioned as a generic label for buttered hard candy in British and American cookbooks alike. The "ice-cream" tag attached to pulled versions, though the reason is uncertain; it is often said to describe the way aerating the sugar by pulling turns it from clear amber to an opaque cream colour. Buckeye Cookery (1877) prints it in a confectionery chapter aimed squarely at home cooks making sweets that would otherwise be bought at a shop, and the recipe offers a substitute for lemons. The instruction to save and dry the boiled peel is of a piece with the book's general refusal to waste anything.