Home › Village Receipts › Pop-Corn Balls
Pop-Corn Balls
If Pop enough corn to fill a medium-sized dish pan; take one cup of molasses and one cup of sugar and boil until it will harden in cold water, then pour in a thin stream over the corn, mixing it through very thoroughly; then butter the hands and dip them in cold water from time to time and work into balls as quickly as possible.
— Mrs. Addison P. Jones
A two-ingredient candy syrup poured over popcorn, with the whole success of the thing resting on how far the syrup is boiled and how fast you work afterward.
- Read the cold-water test as a temperature"Boil until it will harden in cold water" means a drop of syrup dropped into cold water forms a firm, brittle-ish thread rather than a soft blob — somewhere in the hard-ball to light-crack range, very roughly 255-275F on a candy thermometer. Boiled too little and the balls sag and go sticky; boiled much further and the molasses risks scorching and turning bitter.
- How much popcorn a dish pan holdsHousehold dish pans of the period varied, commonly somewhere around 10 quarts and up. A pan filled would be a good deal of corn; for one cup molasses and one cup sugar, figure on something in the region of half a cup of unpopped kernels, giving roughly 4-5 quarts of popped corn, and scale up if you want the pan literally full.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cane molasses, not blackstrap, which is far more bitter than what a 1900s pantry called molasses. Sorghum syrup is a reasonable substitute if you prefer it.
- Pick the corn over firstSift out unpopped kernels and hulls before the syrup goes on. Once coated, a hard kernel is a broken tooth.
- Salt and butterThe receipt gives neither, but a teaspoon of salt tossed through the corn and a tablespoon of butter stirred into the syrup off the heat make a noticeably better ball.
- Speed is the whole trickYou have perhaps two minutes of workable warmth. Have the corn in a large buttered bowl, the syrup poured in a thin stream while stirring with a buttered spoon, and hands buttered and ready. Cold-water dips keep the hands from sticking and from burning — the syrup is above 250F and will cling to skin.
- Warm the corn if you canPopcorn kept warm in a low oven while the syrup boils stays workable longer and tends to coat more evenly than corn that has gone cold on the counter.
- Yield and keepingPerhaps eight to a dozen balls, depending how large you make them. Wrap each in waxed paper once set; they keep a few days but go tough and sticky in humid weather.
Popcorn balls were a fixture of American home confectionery through the second half of the nineteenth century, cheap to make from pantry staples and closely tied to autumn — corn husking, Hallowe'en, church socials and Christmas trees, from which they were often hung on thread. Molasses was the older sweetener of the two here; combining it with refined sugar, as Mrs. Jones does, gives a syrup that sets harder and cleaner than molasses alone while keeping the darker flavor.