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Hard Candied: Taffy
CHOCOLATE TAFFY Take two cupfuls of sugar, one cupful of golden corn syrup, one-half cupful of boiling water, and one-fourth teaspoonful of cream of tartar. Boil to the soft ball stage, then add two ounces of unsweetened chocolate shaved fine. Boil to nearly the crack stage or about 270 degrees, then add one teaspoonful of vanilla. Pour out on a buttered platter, cool and pull. Cut into small pieces, using shears or sharp knife, and place on buttered plate or paraffine paper. MOLASSES TAFFY Take two cupfuls of sugar, and one-half cupful of New Orleans or baking molasses, and one-half cupful of corn syrup, and a third teaspoonful of cream of tartar. Boil to about the crack stage. Turn out on a greased platter, and when cool enough pull until light colored. Cut in small pieces. NUT TAFFY Take two cupfuls of light brown sugar, one-half cupful of corn syrup, one-half cupful of water, and one-fourth teaspoonful of cream of tartar. Boil to the hard ball stage. Add one teaspoonful of vanilla, and one cupful of nut meats, chopped. Pour out on a platter, and pull as soon as cool enough. LEMON STICK CANDY Take two cupfuls of granulated sugar, one-half cupful of white corn syrup, one-half cupful of water, and the juice of one lemon. Boil all together with half the rind of the lemon to the crisp or crack stage. Flavor with one teaspoonful of extract of lemon, and color with yellow coloring. Pour out on a buttered platter, and when cool enough pull into sticks, and cut about four inches long.
PEPPERMINT STICK CANDY Make the same as the lemon stick, but omit the lemon, and use one-fourth teaspoonful of cream of tartar. After removing from fire flavor with peppermint. Divide the candy into two portions, and color one with red coloring. Pull each part separately, then twist the red candy around the white till you have it in form of a stick. Cut into sticks, and if desired form into canes.
STRAWBERRY DROPS Take two cupfuls of granulated sugar, one-half cupful of corn syrup, the juice of one lemon, and a fourth cupful of water. A tablespoonful of vinegar can be used instead of lemon juice if desired. Boil to the hard crack stage. Color with red coloring and flavor with strawberry flavoring. Drop from a spoon in drops about the size of a nickel onto waxed or greased paper. By flavoring with different flavoring and using different colorings you may have a variety in these drop candies.
Six pulled-and-dropped sugar candies built on the same frame: sugar, corn syrup, an acid or invert to stop crystallising, and a boil to a stated stage. The stage names are the whole recipe, so pin them to numbers before you start.
- Translate the stage namesSoft ball is 235-240F, firm ball 245-250F, hard ball 250-265F, soft crack (the book's "crack") 270-290F, hard crack 300-310F. The chocolate taffy conveniently gives its own number, 270F; read the others against it. A digital or candy thermometer clipped to the pan replaces cold-water testing entirely.
- Correct for altitudeSugar syrup temperatures assume boiling water at 212F. Subtract about 1F from every target for each 500 feet above sea level, or the candy will be overcooked and bitter.
- Pull at the right momentThis is the hinge. Let the slab cool on the buttered platter until it holds a dent from your thumb and can be handled with buttered hands, roughly 115-120F. Pulled too hot it burns and runs; pulled too cool it cracks instead of stretching. Pull until the mass turns opaque, pale and stiff, then stop, because aerated taffy will not stretch forever.
- Corn syrup and cream of tartar"Golden corn syrup" was the darker grade of the period and is probably closest to what is now sold as dark corn syrup; the "white" or plain kind corresponds to light corn syrup. Both work as the doctoring agent that keeps the batch from graining. The cream of tartar does the same job by inverting some of the sucrose, and a fourth teaspoon in this quantity is small; much more will make the finished candy sticky in humid weather.
- New Orleans molassesThis meant Louisiana cane molasses, generally a milder, lighter grade than blackstrap and closer to today's unsulphured mild molasses. Avoid blackstrap, which is bitter at these concentrations. The recipe itself offers "baking molasses" as the alternative.
- Paraffine paperParaffin-coated wrapping paper, essentially the same thing as modern waxed paper. Use parchment or waxed paper, not plastic wrap, which will soften against warm candy.
- ChocolateTwo ounces of unsweetened chocolate means baking chocolate at roughly 100 percent cacao. Shave it fine as directed and stir it in off the heat for a moment so it disperses before the syrup climbs to 270F; cocoa butter and cocoa solids both scorch readily against a hot pan bottom.
- ColouringThe "red coloring" of the period may have been cochineal or an early coal-tar dye. Any modern gel or liquid food colour works; add it after the pan leaves the heat, as some colours fade under prolonged high heat.
- Yield and keepingEach batch starts from two cups of sugar and should give roughly a pound of finished candy. Wrap the pieces individually in waxed paper and keep them airtight; pulled taffy and hard drops both go tacky within hours in a humid kitchen.
Pulled candy remained a home-made branch of confectionery even after much of the rest of the trade was factory work, since it needs no moulds, no marble slab and no copper equipment beyond a saucepan. The taffy pull was a set-piece of nineteenth-century American parlour entertainment: the syrup was boiled, poured, and then worked between two people with buttered hands, which is why so many of these instructions say simply "cool and pull" and assume the reader has done it before. What dates this particular set of recipes is the corn syrup. Commercial glucose syrup became cheap and widely sold in the United States in the closing decades of the 1800s, and home candy books from the early twentieth century lean on it hard as insurance against graining, in places where an earlier receipt would have called for molasses, vinegar or cream of tartar alone. The peppermint stick with its red stripe twisted around white is the same construction that gives the Christmas cane its shape; the cane's origin story is often-repeated legend rather than documented record, and striped canes themselves are not attested much before the turn of the twentieth century.