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Molasses Candy
2 cups Porto Rico molasses 3 tablespoons butter 2/3 cup sugar 1 tablespoon vinegar An iron kettle with a rounding bottom (Scotch kettle) or copper kettle is best for candy making. If one has no copper kettle, a granite kettle is best for sugar candies.
Put butter in kettle, place over fire, and when melted, add molasses and sugar. Stir until sugar is dissolved. During the first of the boiling stirring is unnecessary, but when nearly cooked, it should be constantly stirred. Boil until, when tried in cold water, mixture will become brittle. Add vinegar just before taking from fire. Pour into a well buttered pan. When cool enough to handle, pull until porous and light-colored, allowing candy to come in contact with tips of fingers and thumbs, not to be squeezed in the hand. Cut in small pieces, using large shears or a sharp knife, and then arrange on slightly buttered plates to cool.
A straightforward pulled molasses taffy. The only real variable is how far you cook the syrup, and a thermometer removes the guesswork the original left to the cold-water test.
- The hinge: cook to hard crackThe hinge: cook to the crack stage -- "brittle" in cold water means the syrup has passed the soft-crack point and into the hard-crack range, roughly 290-310F, with pulled candies usually taken at the lower end. Below that the candy stays sticky and will not hold a pull; much above it the molasses scorches and turns bitter.
- Porto Rico molassesA named grade of cane molasses sold in the period, not blackstrap. Ordinary unsulphured molasses is the closest substitute; avoid blackstrap, which is too bitter at this concentration.
- The kettleAny heavy pan with a thick bottom works. "Granite" here means graniteware, enamelled steel. What matters is mass and depth: molasses foams up considerably and scorches easily in thin pans.
- Why the vinegarAcid inverts some of the sucrose and keeps the candy from turning grainy as it cools. Adding it at the end rather than at the start limits how much sugar is broken down over the long boil.
- StirringThe instruction is sound. Early on the mixture is dilute enough to look after itself; as the water boils off and the syrup thickens, sugars on the bottom scorch quickly if left alone.
- PullingWork only with the tips of the fingers and thumbs, as directed, rather than squeezing the mass in the hand; greased hands help. Start once it is cool enough to handle, and expect it to stiffen fast.
- Cutting and storingCut the pulled rope with oiled shears while it is still slightly warm; once fully cold it shatters. Wrap pieces individually in waxed paper, as taffy pulls moisture from the air and welds into a single mass.
- YieldRoughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb of candy; the number of pieces depends entirely on how small it is cut.
Pulled molasses candy was the centrepiece of the American taffy pull, a nineteenth-century domestic entertainment in which the cooling syrup was divided among guests to stretch by hand until it aerated and lightened from near-black to tan. The technique is the point: repeated folding traps fine air bubbles, which is what turns a dense, dark, sticky mass into something opaque and short-textured. Cane molasses was the cheap sweetener of the period, and Puerto Rican molasses in particular was a standard grocery item in the northeastern United States, named on labels and in cookbooks as a recognised grade. Fannie Farmer and her contemporaries at the Boston Cooking School gave candy its own chapter and were unusually specific about equipment, reflecting a moment when domestic science writers were trying to put sugar work on a measurable footing before household thermometers were common.