Home › Pop-Corn Sweets › Pop-Corn Sweets
Pop-Corn Sweets
EXCELLENT, inexpensive and nourishing sweets may be made with popped pop-corn. For making these sweets the pop-corn kernels should be large, crisp and with no hard centers. The best way to pop corn to obtain these results is first to use good pop-corn, then put enough corn in the popper just to cover the bottom of popper. Pour some cold water over it and hold the popper some distance from the heat at first. Continue this for three or four minutes, then place more directly over the heat. The fire over which corn is popped should be hot, even and steady. Shake the popper quickly and steadily until nearly all the grains have popped. When commencing to pop almost every grain should pop open at once. The cold water poured over the corn causes a steam to generate ; this makes the corn swell and burst open from the very center in large, crisp, fine flavored kernels. If not ready to make the candy as soon as the corn is popped store in paraffine bags or glass jars and close up tightly, since popped corn soon gets tough if exposed to dampness.
This is the base technique the rest of the pop-corn chapter depends on: dry-popped corn in a hand-shaken basket popper over a live fire. Most of it still holds, but two details need translating.
- The hinge: one thin layerEnough corn "just to cover the bottom of popper" is the whole trick. Kernels piled deeper than one layer insulate each other, and the bottom scorches before the top pops. This applies equally to a heavy lidded pot or a whirley-type stovetop popper.
- The cold waterThe recipe's own explanation is that the water generates steam, which swells the kernel and bursts it from the centre; kernels of the period may also simply have been drier in store than today's, so a splash of water would help. Modern hybrids are packaged at roughly 13-14 percent moisture and need nothing added. Wetting kernels in a hot oiled pan will spit; skip it and keep the corn in a sealed jar instead.
- "Some distance from the heat at first"The staged heating is sound reasoning: a slow warm-up equalizes the kernels so they burst together rather than in a long straggle. On a modern burner, start on medium, give it the three to four minutes the recipe specifies, then go to medium-high and shake steadily.
- A hot, even, steady fireOn gas or electric that means about medium-high, and pulling the pan off as soon as popping slows to a few seconds between pops. Past that point the popped corn scorches while the last stubborn kernels sit there.
- Paraffine bagsWax-paper bags, the standard airtight-ish wrapping of the period. Any zip-top bag or glass jar does the same job, and the warning is real: popped corn goes leathery within hours in humid air, and stale corn will not take a candy coating crisply.
- No hard centersThe "hard center" is an unexploded starch core. Cull the unpopped and half-popped kernels before coating, or they turn up as tooth-breakers in the finished caramel or nut candy.
- YieldA scant half cup of kernels gives roughly 4 quarts of popped corn, which is worth knowing when a later recipe in the chapter calls for a given number of quarts. The recipe itself specifies no quantity.
Popcorn is a distinct variety of maize, Zea mays everta, with a hull tough enough to hold steam until the starch inside bursts; the practice of parching maize this way is long-established among Indigenous peoples of the Americas and reached wide commercial popularity in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. Cheap, light and available by the bushel, it was a natural extender for confectioners' molasses and caramel, which is why a home candy book of this period opens its chapter with popping instructions rather than a candy: everything that follows is a syrup poured over corn. Steam-powered street poppers, generally credited to Charles Cretors of Chicago from the mid-1880s and shown widely at the 1893 Columbian Exposition, put the smell of hot popcorn on American sidewalks and made the domestic version an obvious economy, and the basket popper shaken over the fire described here was the standard household tool for it well into the twentieth century.