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Lemon Candy
Take a pound loaf-sugar and a large cup water, and after cooking over a slow fire half an hour, clear with a little hot vinegar, take off the scum as it rises, testing by raising with a spoon, and when the "threads" will snap like glass pour into a tin pan, and when nearly cold mark in narrow strips with a knife. Before pouring into the pans, chopped cocoa-nut, almonds, hickory-nuts, or Brazil-nuts cut in slices, may be stirred into it. - Mrs. V. K. W.
A plain hard candy at the hard-crack stage, sweetened only by sugar and given snap by a splash of acid. The whole recipe turns on one judgement: the temperature at which you stop cooking.
- The hinge: the thread test"Threads that snap like glass" is the hard-crack stage, about 300-310F on a candy thermometer. Stopped short of it the candy stays tacky and chewy; taken well past it, the sugar begins to darken and takes on a scorched, caramel bitterness that swamps the lemon.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a cone and broken up for use, valued because it was cleaner than the brown and yellow grades. Ordinary granulated white sugar is its direct equivalent: 1 lb is about 2 1/4 cups.
- A large cup of waterRead this as about 1 cup. The exact amount is not critical, since nearly all of it boils away before the hard-crack stage; more water only means a longer boil.
- Vinegar, and where the lemon wentThe vinegar is the acid that inverts some of the sugar and keeps the batch from crystallizing into a gritty mass. A teaspoon is plenty. Note that the recipe as printed never adds lemon at all; period practice would be a few drops of oil or extract of lemon stirred in off the heat, once the boiling has stopped.
- Skimming and the slow fireHalf an hour over a slow fire suits a wood or coal range with uneven heat. On a modern burner, dissolve the sugar fully over medium heat without stirring once it boils, and expect 15-20 minutes total. Skim any grey scum, and wash stray crystals down from the pan sides with a wet brush.
- The tin panUse a buttered or oiled rimmed sheet pan, or one lined with a silicone mat rated for high heat. The syrup goes in at over 300F, so ordinary plastic or unrated liners will not do.
- Marking the stripsThe window is short. The recipe says to mark it "when nearly cold": score with an oiled knife once the sheet has set enough to hold a line but still gives under pressure, then snap along the marks when fully cold. Left too long, it will shatter wherever it likes.
- Nuts and coconutWarm and thoroughly dry them first. Any moisture makes the hot syrup spit, and cold additions chill it into stiffness before it can be poured level.
- Yield and keepingAbout 1 lb of candy. Hard candy pulls water from humid air and turns sticky within a day; store it airtight, layered with parchment, and do not attempt it on a damp day.
Buckeye Cookery's confectionery chapter belongs to the moment when sugar became cheap enough for ordinary Midwestern households to boil for pleasure rather than for preserving. Recipes like this one are the domestic counterpart of the commercial candy trade then expanding in American cities: the same hard-crack syrup, flavored with the volatile oils of lemon, peppermint or wintergreen, that filled the glass jars of a corner store. The cook here has no thermometer, so she relies on a sequence of hand tests, of which the snapping thread is the last and highest; such tests were the standard vocabulary of nineteenth-century candy making, and the names for the stages we still use, soft ball through hard crack, are their descendants. The list of nuts is a fair inventory of what an Ohio kitchen could get in the 1870s: hickory nuts gathered locally, coconut and Brazil nuts arriving by rail as imported luxuries worth naming.