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Mount Holyoke Candy
3 C sugar 1 C sweet milk 1 C walnut meats Butter size of egg Put 2 cups of sugar, milk and butter on to boil. Put 1 cup of sugar in saucepan and brown. When melted pour boiling mixture into it slowly. Let cook until it forms a soft ball in cold water. Beat until creamy. Add nuts and flavoring.
Miss V. Sutton.
A caramel-based penuche in the old style: part of the sugar is dry-caramelised, then the hot milk mixture is added to it. The listed ingredients are incomplete, so read the method for quantities and expect to judge the milk by eye.
- Sugar, in two partsTwo cups of sugar go into the pan with the milk and butter; a third cup is browned dry in a separate saucepan. Total sugar is 3 cups (about 1 lb 5 oz).
- The missing milkNo quantity is given for the milk. A cup of whole milk to 3 cups of sugar is a reasonable working guess, but the recipe gives no guidance; too little and the syrup may scorch before it reaches temperature.
- Butter size of an eggRoughly 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons.
- Caramelising the dry sugarStir the single cup of sugar constantly over medium heat until it liquefies and turns deep amber. It goes from amber to burnt in seconds, and burnt caramel will make the whole batch bitter.
- Adding the hot mixturePour the boiling milk syrup into the caramel very slowly, standing back. It will erupt with steam and the caramel will seize briefly before dissolving again.
- Soft ball in cold waterThat is 234-240F on a thermometer. Below it the candy never sets; above it you get something closer to hard toffee.
- Beat until creamyLet the syrup cool undisturbed to about 110F before beating, or the sugar will crystallise coarse and grainy. Beat until it loses its gloss and thickens, then work fast: it stiffens all at once.
- FlavouringUnspecified, and vanilla is the safe assumption -- about a teaspoon, added with the nuts at the very end so the alcohol does not flash off.
- YieldSomewhere in the region of 1 1/2 to 1 3/4 lb. A buttered square pan of about 8 inches suits the quantity; score into squares while still warm.
Named candies circulated between American women's colleges in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries -- Smith, Vassar and Wellesley all lent their names to fudges and penuches, and Mount Holyoke's name is often said to attach to candies in the same way. Accounts of college sweet-making describe batches produced in dormitory rooms over spirit lamps or chafing dishes. The dry-caramel step here is what separates this from plain fudge: browning part of the sugar gives the finished candy the toffee note that older cookbooks called "burnt sugar" flavour, a trick used before commercial caramel colouring and butterscotch extracts were widely sold.