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Ice Cream Candy
3 cups sugar 1/2 cup boiling water 1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar 1/2 tablespoon vinegar Boil ingredients together without stirring, until, when tried in cold water, mixture will become brittle. Turn on a well butttered platter to cool. As edges cool, fold towards centre. As soon as it can be handled, pull until white and glossy. While pulling, flavor as desired, using vanilla, orange extract, coffee extract, oil of sassafras, or melted chocolate. Cut in sticks or small pieces.
A sugar-pulled candy in the taffy family, worked by hand until the sugar traps enough air to turn opaque white. The whole thing hinges on cooking to the right stage and on getting it off the heat before the sugar colours.
- "Brittle in cold water" means hard crackThat description corresponds to 300-310F on a thermometer: a drizzle into ice water sets into threads that snap rather than bend. A few degrees short and the candy will sag and stay sticky instead of holding a stick shape.
- Do not stir, and wash the sides downStirring a boiling sugar syrup invites crystallisation, which is why the original forbids it. Brush the pan walls with a wet pastry brush early on, or cover the pan for the first two minutes so steam rinses stray crystals back into the syrup.
- Why both cream of tartar and vinegarBoth are acids, and their job is to invert part of the sucrose so the finished candy stays smooth and pullable rather than turning grainy. Either alone would do the work; the pair is belt and braces. Use plain white vinegar, not cider or wine vinegar.
- Skip the oil of sassafrasSassafras oil is high in safrole, which has been barred from use in food in the United States since 1960. The other flavourings listed all still stand; vanilla or a good orange oil is the usual choice.
- Flavour goes in at the folding stageExtracts added to 300F syrup will mostly flash off, and a volume of liquid poured onto hot sugar can spit. Sprinkle a teaspoon of extract over the slab once the edges have cooled, then let the folding and pulling distribute it.
- The platter and the pullingA well-buttered marble slab or a rimmed sheet pan works better than a china platter, which can crack under the temperature shock. Pull with buttered hands, in cotton or nitrile gloves if you have them, since the mass is still uncomfortably hot when it first becomes workable.
- Work fast at the endOnce the candy has gone white and glossy it stiffens within a minute or two. Draw it into a rope of the thickness you want and cut with buttered scissors on a buttered surface, then wrap the pieces individually in waxed paper before they weld together.
- Yield and keepingThree cups of sugar gives roughly 1 1/4 lb of candy, a few dozen short sticks depending on how they are cut. Store airtight and dry; on a humid day the surface will turn tacky within hours.