Cream Candy
Two pounds of sugar, half a cup water, two tablespoonfuls vinegar, one tablespoonful butter. Boil twenty minutes. Season with lemon or vanilla, just as you take it off. Put in a dish and stir till cold.--Mrs. McN.
A four-ingredient sugar candy whose success depends entirely on the temperature you pull it off the fire at — and the original gives you a clock instead of a thermometer.
- The hinge: cook to temperature, not to twenty minutesTwenty minutes was calibrated to one cook's kettle over one wood range. Use a candy thermometer: 235-240F (soft ball) gives a soft, creamy grained candy, and taking it nearer 255-260F gives a firmer, crisper set. The vinegar makes the syrup slightly more forgiving, but a heavy pan and moderate heat still matter.
- Quantities in modern measureTwo pounds of granulated sugar is about 4 1/2 cups. Half a cup of water is a very small amount of liquid for that much sugar, which is correct for a stiff candy but means the pan must be heavy-bottomed and the heat moderate at the start so the sugar dissolves fully before boiling.
- Why the vinegar is thereAcid inverts part of the sucrose during boiling, which keeps the candy from setting into one hard crystalline lump. Cream of tartar or a spoonful of corn syrup does the same job; do not leave the acid out.
- Wash the sugar crystals downNothing in the original says so, but once the syrup boils, cover the pan for two or three minutes or wipe the sides with a wet brush. A single stray crystal will seed the whole batch and turn it sandy.
- "Season with lemon or vanilla, just as you take it off"Flavor after the pan leaves the heat, roughly a teaspoon of extract for this quantity. Added earlier, the alcohol and volatile oils boil straight off.
- "Put in a dish and stir till cold"This is deliberate crystallization — the beating throws down fine crystals and makes the candy opaque and creamy rather than clear and glassy. Pour into a buttered shallow pan or onto a buttered marble slab, let it cool until it holds a fingerprint, then work it. Stirring while it is still near boiling will produce coarse grain.
- Butter, not margarine or spreadOne tablespoon of butter for two pounds of sugar is there for mouthfeel and to discourage boiling over. Water-heavy spreads change the ratio and can make the syrup spit.
- Yield and keepingAbout two pounds of finished candy, enough to fill a 9x9 pan thinly or make three or four dozen small pieces. Cut or break it as soon as it is set and store airtight; humidity turns grained sugar candy sticky within a day or two.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, is a contributor book: recipes came in from a large number of Virginia and border-state households and were printed under initials, as this one is under "Mrs. McN." Cream candy of this kind — sugar, water, an acid, a little butter, then worked until it grains — was a common piece of nineteenth-century domestic confectionery. The name appears to refer to the texture rather than to any dairy: the beating breaks the sugar into crystals fine enough to feel creamy on the tongue. The closely related Southern practice of pulling the hot mass over a hook until it turns white and ribbed is often associated with Kentucky and Tennessee kitchens, where "cream candy" and "pulled candy" could be the same sweet under two names, and where candy-pulling gatherings were a recognized form of winter entertainment.