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Caramels
One cake of chocolate, two pounds of moist brown sugar, onefourth pound of butter, one cup of milk, one tablespoon of vanilla stirred in when cooked; boil fifteen minutes, stirring constantly. Beat thoroughly after taking it from the fire.
— Miss Alma Dorwaldt
A short, sugar-heavy caramel of the kind copied between neighbours: no thermometer, no pan size, no yield. Two details need translating before it will work.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockFifteen minutes at a hard boil in a nineteenth-century pan on a wood range is not fifteen minutes on a gas burner. Work to 245-250F (firm-ball) for caramels that hold a cut and still chew; much beyond that they set progressively harder.
- One cake of chocolateGenuinely ambiguous. Household chocolate then was unsweetened and sold as a block, commonly half a pound, scored into small squares of about an ounce; 'a cake' could mean either the whole block or a single square. Start with 1-2 oz unsweetened baking chocolate for this quantity of sugar.
- Moist brown sugarA soft, damp, partly refined sugar. Modern light or dark brown sugar is the direct descendant and needs no adjustment; dark gives a more molasses-forward caramel.
- What the beating doesBeating a caramel after it comes off the heat encourages sugar crystals and pushes the result toward a fudge-like, slightly grainy chew rather than a clear, glossy caramel. That may well be the texture intended here, though the recipe does not say so. For a smooth caramel, stir only enough to combine the vanilla and pour at once.
- Stirring constantly mattersWith milk and butter in the pan, the mixture scorches readily. Use a heavy-bottomed pan at least three times the volume of the ingredients, since it climbs when it boils, and keep a silicone spatula moving across the base.
- Pan and cuttingPour into a buttered 8-inch square pan. Score into squares while still warm and pliable, then cut through once fully set; a cold slab of caramel resists a knife and shatters at the edges.
- VanillaA full tablespoon reads as a lot by modern habit, but much of the alcohol flashes off in the hot syrup. Two teaspoons is a fair modern equivalent if you prefer restraint.
- YieldTwo pounds of sugar with butter, milk and chocolate will give something over 2 lb of finished candy once the milk's water has boiled away; cut to whatever size suits the slab. Wrap in waxed paper if they are to be kept more than a day, as they weep in humid air.
Caramels belong to the great wave of home candy-making that followed cheap refined sugar in the second half of the nineteenth century, when a cake of unsweetened chocolate became a normal grocery item rather than a luxury. The word itself comes through French from Spanish caramelo, and in earlier English usage meant simply burnt sugar; the soft, milk-and-butter chewing caramel is a later American development, and its technique of boiling dairy with sugar is the same one that produced fudge and penuche, though fudge is documented only from the late 1880s and 1890s, appreciably later than the chewing caramel. A community cookbook receipt like this one, signed with a neighbour's name and assuming the reader already knows what a boiled sugar looks like when it is done, suggests that these books may have served more as memory aids among cooks familiar with each other's methods than as instructions for strangers.