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Candies and Candy Making: Pulled
To Pull Candy. -The best way to pull candy is to grease the hands thoroughly with butter to prevent sticking, or they may be covered with flour. The work should commence as soon as the candy is cool enough to bear the hands. Work with the tips of the fingers until it grows cool. "Pull Smartly."
Continue to pull until it is of a light golden color, or white, according to the recipe. Pull smartly, either by the help of another person or over a hook. Finally, draw out in sticks on waxed paper, or other smooth surface, which may be dusted with flour and cut with shears into sticks.
Pulled Taffy for a Taffy Pull.- Either sugar or molasses taffy may be pulled. For sugar taffy, boil together to the soft ball 3 cupfuls of granulated sugar, cupful of vinegar, 1/2 cupful of water; now add 1/4 tablespoonful of butter stirred in quickly, and boil until it hardens and becomes brittle in cold water. Add any flavoring extract desired just before removing from the fire. Pour on a buttered platter to cool, turn in the edges as fast as it cools, and when cold enough to handle pull until white and brittle. Or for molasses taffy boil to the soft ball 1 quart of New Orleans molasses, 1 tablespoonful of granulated sugar. Now stir in 2 tablespoonfuls of vinegar, pound of butter, and boil until it becomes hard and brittle in cold water. Just before removing from the fire stir in 1 teaspoonfu a CANDIES AND CANDY MAKING of soda dissolved in hot water and pull.
A technique note followed by two taffy formulas. The whole thing turns on sugar temperature, and a candy thermometer removes all the guesswork the original leaves in.
- The hinge: cook to hard crack, not soft ballBoth formulas say to boil to the soft ball stage first and then continue until the syrup "hardens and becomes brittle in cold water." That second stage is hard crack, 300-310F. Stop at soft ball (235-240F) and you will have a sticky mass that never pulls white.
- Cool to handling temperature, not warmPoured candy at 300F will cause serious burns. Let it sit on the greased slab or platter until the surface is merely warm to a buttered fingertip, folding the cooling edges toward the centre so it firms evenly, then work with fingertips before committing your palms.
- Missing fractions in the vinegar and butterThe sugar taffy calls for "cupful of vinegar" and the molasses version for "pound of butter" with the fraction dropped in both places; the printed text is defective, not the author's intention. Whatever figure you supply is a reconstruction, not the author's. Note that the butter is given in pounds, so the missing fraction implies at least a couple of ounces, not a spoonful.
- New Orleans molassesThis means a mild, light cane molasses, not blackstrap. Modern unsulphured cooking molasses is the closest match; blackstrap is far more bitter and will dominate the finished candy.
- Soda at the endThe recipe puts the teaspoon of soda dissolved in hot water in just before the pan comes off the fire, after the syrup has reached the brittle stage. It aerates the molasses candy and makes it lighter to chew. Add it slowly, since the mixture foams up sharply.
- Flour or butter on the handsThe recipe allows either, but butter is generally the better choice; flour worked into hot candy can leave a raw taste and dull the surface of candy meant to pull white.
- The hookThe recipe's "hook" is simply a smooth, sturdy fixed hook set high enough to pull against. A heavy stand-mixer dough hook or a well-scrubbed cabinet handle serves the same purpose: something to loop the rope over so one person can do the work of two.
- Yield and storageEach formula makes a generous platterful, the molasses batch appreciably the larger of the two, enough for a party at a pull. Cut the ropes with oiled shears and wrap the pieces individually in waxed paper; unwrapped pulled taffy tends to fuse together and goes soft in humid air.
A taffy pull was a fixture of nineteenth-century American parlour entertaining, and this entry treats it as an event as much as a confection: the candy is cheap, the labour is the point, and the pulling is done in pairs. The technique is straightforward physics. Stretching and folding a supersaturated sugar mass folds in air and aligns the strands, which is what turns a clear amber syrup opaque and pale and changes the texture from glassy to short and chewable. Vinegar and, in the molasses version, soda both work against unwanted crystallisation, one by inverting some of the sucrose and the other by neutralising acid and lightening the mass. Molasses was the cheaper sweetener of the two, and is often said to be the older, and the granulated-sugar version here reflects how far refined sugar prices had fallen by the time household compendiums like this one were being assembled around the turn of the twentieth century.