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Macaroons and Miscellaneous Sweets: Remove
BUTTERCUPS Take two cupfuls of granulated sugar, one-half cupful of water and one-half teaspoonful of cream of tartar and boil to the crack stage. Remove from the fire, flavor with one teaspoonful of lemon extract and color yellow with a few drops of yellow fruit or vegetable coloring. When cool enough to handle, pull the yellow candy in a long sheet about two inches wide. In the center of this lay a roll of white or chocolate fondant as long as the strip of candy. Wrap the yellow candy around this fondant, and pull out gently in the hand until you cannot tell where it has been joined. When about cool cut with scissors into lengths of an inch or less.
HODGE-PODGE CANDY Place in a bowl one cupful of chopped roasted peanuts, one cupful of chopped pecan meats, one cupful of grated cocoanut, one-half cupful of finely chopped citron, one-fourth cupful each of candied orange and lemon peel, two teaspoonfuls of vanilla and two tablespoonfuls of lemon juice. Take two cupfuls of brown sugar, one cupful of granulated sugar, one cupful of molasses, and one-half teaspoonful of salt. Boil to the soft ball stage, then add two squares of chocolate and a table-spoonful of butter. Boil to the hard ball stage, add one teaspoonful of vanilla, then pour over the nut and fruit mixture in the bowl. Stir until it begins to get creamy and thick, then put into the pans quickly, spreading it even with a spoon. Mark off into squares, and when cool cut. This can be varied by adding different kinds of fruits and nuts.
CANDIED SWEET POTATO BALLS Take some good sweet potatoes, peel them, and then scoop out little balls with a vegetable scoop. Boil these balls in slightly salted water until tender enough to pierce with a splint. Remove from the fire and drain off the water. Take two cupfuls of sugar and one-half cupful of water and cook to a thick syrup, add a teaspoonful of vanilla and part of the potato balls, dropping them in carefully to prevent breaking. Let them simmer until they are coated with a thick coating and are transparent or clear. Remove one at a time with a skimmer or fork, and drop on paraffine paper. These should harden up on the outside, and make a delicious confection.
Three separate confections share this page, and all three hinge on reading sugar temperatures correctly. A thermometer removes nearly all the guesswork the original leaves to the cook's judgment.
- Crack stageFor the buttercups, read this as roughly 290-310F. Pulled at the lower end of the range the ribbon is more likely to sag and weep than to hold a crisp shell around the fondant core.
- Soft ball and hard ballIn the hodge-podge, soft ball is 235-240F and hard ball 250-265F. The chocolate and butter go in at the lower reading, which drops the temperature; bring it back up before adding the final vanilla.
- Squares of chocolateTwo squares means two ounces of unsweetened baking chocolate, sold in that form when the book was written. Semi-sweet is not a substitute here without cutting sugar elsewhere.
- Pulling hot sugarCandy at 300F is far hotter than boiling water and sticks to skin. Let the sheet cool on an oiled slab until it holds a dent under a finger, and butter or oil your hands before working it.
- Paraffine paperPlain waxed paper or a silicone mat. Parchment works for the potato balls but glazed sugar releases most cleanly from a lightly oiled surface.
- Vegetable scoop and splintA melon baller and a wooden skewer or toothpick. Cut the balls slightly larger than you want them finished, since boiling shrinks them a little.
- Thick syrup for the potatoesTwo cups sugar to half a cup water taken to roughly 235-240F gives a syrup that will glaze rather than run off. Simmer the balls gently; a rolling boil breaks them apart.
- Citron and candied peelCandied citron is still sold around the winter holidays but is scarce otherwise. Candied orange peel alone, or a mix of peel and dried apricot, keeps the texture the recipe wants.
- YieldThe hodge-podge makes a substantial batch; the recipe's own "pans" suggests more than one small pan. Buttercup yield depends entirely on how thin the rope is pulled before cutting.
Buttercups belong to the pulled-candy tradition of American home confectionery before the First World War, when a marble slab and a hook fixed to the kitchen wall were, by some accounts, part of the equipment of anyone who made candy seriously. The trick of wrapping a pulled sugar ribbon around a fondant center, then drawing the whole thing out until the seam disappears, may be a domestic simplification of the ribbon-and-filling work commercial candy makers did on a much larger scale. Hodge-podge is exactly what the name suggests, a catch-all in the manner of the older English hodgepodge stew, and the closing line inviting different fruits and nuts marks it as a recipe for using up whatever candied peel and nutmeats the pantry held. The candied sweet potato balls point to a Southern habit of treating the sweet potato as a confection rather than a vegetable, a use generally traced to the abundance of the crop and the long tradition of preserving fruit in heavy syrup.