Home › Recipes › Chocolate Candy
Chocolate Candy
2 tablespoons butter, 1 cup molasses, 2 cups sugar, 1 cup milk, 1/2 lb. Walter Baker & Co.'s Premium No. 1 Chocolate.
Melt butter in granite-ware saucepan or iron kettle, and add molasses, sugar and milk; stir until sugar is dissolved, and, when boiling point is reached, add chocolate (melted over hot water) gradually, while stirring constantly. Let boil until, when tried in cold water, a firm ball may be formed between the fingers. Turn into a buttered pan, cool, and mark in small squares.
A molasses-and-chocolate caramel of the sort sold by weight in confectioners' shops. It is a boiled sugar recipe, so the water test is the whole recipe; everything else is assembly.
- The hinge: read the ball, not the clock"A firm ball" formed in cold water corresponds to roughly 245-250F on a thermometer. Under that the squares will slump at room temperature; take it much further and the candy turns hard and dry rather than chewy.
- Premium No. 1 ChocolateWalter Baker's Premium No. 1 was plain unsweetened chocolate, not a sweetened eating bar. Use 8 oz of unsweetened baking chocolate; substituting semisweet or chocolate chips adds sugar and fat the boil is not balanced for.
- Granite-wareEnameled sheet steel, the standard cheap saucepan of the period. Any heavy pan with a light-colored interior works; the point is that you can see the color of the syrup and it will not react with molasses. Choose a pan at least three times the volume of the mixture, since milk and molasses foam high.
- MolassesHousehold molasses of the period was generally a light or medium cane syrup rather than blackstrap. Blackstrap is markedly more bitter and mineral and will fight the unsweetened chocolate; use unsulphured dark or light molasses.
- Stir and watch the bottomMilk solids and molasses both scorch readily at candy temperatures. Keep the heat moderate and the spoon moving across the bottom of the pan; a burnt note at this stage cannot be corrected.
- Adding the chocolateMelting it separately over hot water and pouring it in gradually keeps the syrup from dropping out of the boil and prevents lumps of unmelted chocolate. Do not simply drop in the cake of chocolate.
- Pan and markingAn 8-inch square pan, buttered, gives squares of a workable thickness. Score the surface with an oiled knife while the candy is still warm and pliable, then cut through once it has set; waiting until it is cold makes clean pieces difficult.
- YieldAbout 2 1/4 lb, or roughly 60 one-inch squares. Wrapped in waxed paper it keeps a week or two in a tin; it softens in humid weather.
Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, was the oldest chocolate concern in the United States, and its Choice Recipes booklets were advertising: nearly every formula names a Baker product, and the No. 1 grade of plain chocolate appears again and again. Recipes of this kind sit between the older molasses candies of New England kitchens and the chocolate confectionery of the late nineteenth century, a period when cheaper sugar and factory-made chocolate made home candy-making more widely practicable. The absence of a thermometer is telling: the cold-water test was the standard household gauge well into the twentieth century, and candy thermometers only became ordinary domestic equipment later. The instruction to "mark in small squares" suggests candy cut from a slab rather than molded into individual pieces.