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Treacle Toffee
Rub the saucepan with butter, and pour in as much treacle as may be wanted. Let it boil gently until a small portion will break between the teeth after being thrown into cold water. When the toffee has reached this point it should be taken at once off the fire, or it will very quickly acquire a burnt taste. Pour it upon a buttered dish, and when it is cool roll it into sticks, and fold it in clean white paper. The toffee may, if liked, be flavoured with essence of peppermint, or almond, or lemon flavouring; and it is said that treacle toffee with a little cayenne pepper thrown into it is an excellent cure for a cough.
A one-ingredient sugar boil, which means everything depends on the temperature you take it off the heat. Treacle scorches faster than sugar syrup, so stay with the pan.
- TreacleIn British usage this normally means black treacle rather than golden syrup. The nearest American equivalent is unsulphured molasses (blackstrap is more bitter still). Its bitterness is part of the flavour; golden syrup gives a pale, much sweeter toffee.
- The hinge"Break between the teeth" is the hard-crack stage, 300-310F/149-154C. A sugar thermometer removes all guesswork; the cold-water test works but leaves you a narrow window before the burnt taste sets in.
- Pan choiceUse a heavy, deep, light-coloured pan. Treacle darkens as it cooks so you cannot judge by colour, and it climbs the sides when it hits full boil.
- Off the heat means offA thick pan holds enough heat to carry the sugar several degrees further after you remove it. Set the base in a shallow tray of cold water for a few seconds to stop the cooking if you want precision.
- FlavouringAdd essences after the pan is off the heat, a quarter teaspoon at a time; volatile oils boil away and peppermint at hard-crack temperature will steam off almost entirely.
- Rolling into sticksWait until the slab is cool enough to handle but still pliable; how long that takes depends on how thickly it was poured. Butter your hands. Left much longer it becomes glass and can only be cracked into shards.
- Wrapping and keepingWaxed paper rather than the plain white paper specified; treacle toffee is hygroscopic and is apt to stick to uncoated paper. Keep it in an airtight tin, not the fridge.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity ('as much treacle as may be wanted'). For a modern trial, about 12 oz/340g of treacle makes a small slab. Halving is easier than doubling, since a deeper mass of syrup is harder to read.
- The cough cureIgnore it. Cayenne in toffee is a period folk remedy, not medicine, and a mouthful of hard sugar and capsicum is no help to an irritated throat.
Treacle toffee belongs to the north of England, where it is still tied to Bonfire Night on 5 November and known variously as plot toffee or, in Yorkshire and Lancashire, tom trot. Treacle was the cheap sweetener of the nineteenth-century industrial household, the residue left after sugar refining, and toffee made from it was within reach of families for whom refined sugar confectionery was not. The claim about cayenne curing a cough is reported at arm's length, and rightly so; hot, sweet and pungent remedies for chest complaints were common domestic lore, and treacle in particular appeared in home cough mixtures of the period.