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Candies and Candy Making: Test
Or boil together to the hard snap 2 cupfuls of brown sugar, 1 cupful of molasses, cupful of water, 1 tablespoonful of vinegar. Just before removing from the fire stir in teaspoonful of soda dissolved in hot water. Test in cold water. Add flavoring matter and pull until the color becomes a rich gold.
To Make Molasses Candy. - The simplest way to make old-fashioned molasses candy for a candy pull is to boil the best Porto Rico molasses over a slow fire until it is done, which will require 2 hours or more.
Two methods for pulled molasses candy, printed as a run-on. The first is a proper boiled sugar-and-molasses taffy; the second is molasses alone, reduced for hours over low heat.
- Missing fractionsThe text as printed reads "cupful of water" and "teaspoonful of soda" with no quantity attached, which suggests a fraction was dropped in setting the type. Judge the water by the boil — you are evaporating it off anyway — and go easy on the soda, since too much will foam the batch over the pan and leave a soapy taste.
- "Hard snap"This is the hard-crack stage, 300-310F on a thermometer. Tested the old way, a drizzle into cold water sets into threads that break cleanly between the teeth rather than bending.
- Porto Rico molassesA cane molasses from Puerto Rico, one of the origins routinely named in period cookbooks; the recipe asks for the best of it. Use a good dark molasses; blackstrap is too bitter and too low in sugar to pull well.
- The sodaStirred in just before the pan comes off the fire, it neutralises acid and aerates the mass so it pulls light and opaque instead of glassy. Dissolve it in hot water first, as the recipe directs.
- Two hours of boilingThe second method works because pure molasses is roughly a quarter water, but at that length over direct heat it scorches easily. A heavy pan, the lowest flame that keeps it moving, and a thermometer to catch it at hard crack are the practical amendments.
- Pouring and pullingPour onto a buttered slab or sheet pan, let the edges cool until you can gather it, and butter your hands. Pull as soon as it is handleable — once it cools too far it stops stretching and cracks.
- FlavouringAdd extracts, vanilla or peppermint, after the pan comes off the heat; at 300F volatile oils simply boil away.
- YieldNo yield is stated, but the sugar and molasses in the first formula come to something over 1 lb of candy. Pull, twist into a rope, and cut into inch pieces with buttered scissors, then wrap in waxed paper — the finished candy pulls moisture from the air and will weld into a single mass if left open.
Candy pulls were a fixture of American winter sociability through the nineteenth century, a party built around a confection an ordinary household could manage: molasses was cheap, needed no refining skill, and the pulling gave a roomful of people something to do with their hands. That molasses came north as the byproduct of Caribbean sugar production, and cookbooks of this period name its origin the way one names a wine fb Porto Rico, New Orleans, West India fb because the grades really did behave differently in the pan. The soda trick belongs to the same era as the rise of commercial saleratus and baking soda: a pinch stirred into hot molasses was said to lighten both the colour and the texture, which is why pulled candy of this kind comes out the pale gold the recipe asks for rather than the near-black of the syrup it started as.