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Chocolate Pop Corn Balls
1 1/2 cups of sugar, 1/3 a cup of pure corn syrup, 2/3 a cup of water, 1/3 a cup of molasses, 3 tablespoonfuls of butter, 3 squares of Baker's Premium No. 1 Chocolate, 1 teaspoonful of vanilla extract, About 4 quarts of popped corn, well salted.
Set the sugar, pure corn syrup and water over the fire, stir until the sugar is melted, then wash down the sides of the saucepan, cover and let boil three or four minutes, then remove the cover and let cook without stirring to the hard ball degree; add the molasses and butter and stir constantly until brittle in cold water; remove from the fire and, as soon as the bubbling ceases, add the chocolate, melted over hot water, and the vanilla; stir, to mix the chocolate evenly through the candy, then pour onto the popped corn, mixing the two together meanwhile. With buttered hands lightly roll the mixture into small balls. Press the mixture together only just enough to hold it in shape. Discard all the hard kernels in the corn. Have the corn warm and in a warm bowl.
A hard-crack caramel corn with unsweetened chocolate stirred in at the end. The two temperature stages are the whole recipe; everything else is assembly.
- Read the two stages as numbers"Hard ball degree" is 250-266F, and "brittle in cold water" is the hard-crack stage, 300-310F. Cook the sugar, corn syrup and water to the first, add molasses and butter, then keep going with constant stirring to the second.
- Baker's Premium No. 1This was unsweetened baking chocolate in one-ounce squares, so 3 squares means 3 oz. Modern unsweetened baking chocolate is the direct equivalent; do not substitute semi-sweet, which will make the coating cloying and slack.
- Chocolate goes in off the heatMelt it separately over hot water and stir it in only after the bubbling stops. Chocolate cocoa solids scorch fast at 300F, and the cocoa butter will separate into a greasy film if the syrup is still boiling.
- Warm the corn, and mean itFour quarts of popped corn is roughly 1/2 cup of unpopped kernels. Cold corn chills the syrup on contact and you get lumps of candy and bare popcorn instead of a coating. A low oven, around 200F, holds both corn and bowl at the right temperature.
- Washing down the panWipe the inside of the pan above the syrup with a wet brush, then cover for those three or four minutes. The trapped steam dissolves stray crystals that would otherwise seed the whole batch grainy.
- MolassesUse unsulphured dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and will fight the unsweetened chocolate. It is there for flavour and for a little acid, which helps keep the syrup from setting up crystalline.
- ShapingButter your hands generously and work quickly; the mixture stiffens fast as it cools but is scaldingly hot straight from the pan, so let it stand a minute and work in stages. Pressing lightly, as instructed, is what keeps the balls from turning into dense candy bricks.
- Yield and keepingNo yield is given; expect somewhere between a dozen and two dozen small balls, depending on how tightly you press. Wrap individually in waxed paper once cool; they hold two or three days but go sticky in humid weather.
Choice Recipes was one of a long series of pamphlets issued by the Walter Baker company of Dorchester, Massachusetts, a chocolate mill whose origins go back to the 1760s and which built much of its later trade on recipe booklets naming its own products in every ingredient list. The Premium No. 1 called for here was plain unsweetened chocolate, the company's flagship, and its appearance in a popcorn ball is a small piece of marketing strategy: popcorn balls were already a fixture of American fairs, church socials and Hallowe'en by the 1890s, usually bound with molasses or plain caramel, so grafting chocolate onto a familiar sweet was an easy way to move a familiar dish into a new department. The doubled cooking stage, hard ball and then hard crack after the molasses and butter go in, is standard confectioners' practice of the period, written down at a time when home cooks are often said to have been beginning to work with candy thermometers rather than judging syrup entirely by the cold-water test the wording still preserves.