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Puffed Rice Candy
2 C granulated sugar 1 C water 1 T vinegar 4 T Karo syrup Mrs. R. F. Wright, Eleanor Treptow.
Butter size of egg Pinch of salt 1 pkg. Puffed Rice Boil together the sugar, water and vinegar for five minutes. Add the syrup, butter, and salt. Boil until it becomes hard and brittle when dropped into cold water. Take from fire, stir in one package Puffed Rice which has been previously crisped in moderate oven, and spread on buttered pan to cool. 1 C granulated sugar 1 C brown sugar 2 C dark corn syrup Eleanor Treptow.
A hard-crack caramel poured over puffed rice — the ancestor of the pressed rice-cereal bar. The transcription runs two contributors' ingredient lists together, so read the list carefully before starting.
- The stray ingredients at the endThe final line — 1 cup granulated sugar, 1 cup brown sugar, 2 cups dark corn syrup — belongs to a different recipe that has bled into this one in the original printing. Ignore it entirely; the candy uses only the ingredients named above the instructions.
- Butter size of an eggAbout 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century books measured butter by comparison because it was cut from a crock or a print, not a marked stick.
- Hard and brittle in cold waterThis is the hard-crack stage, 300–310F on a candy thermometer. The syrup will thread and snap rather than bend when dropped into cold water. Below that it stays tacky and the finished candy will slump.
- Karo syrupCorn syrup, still sold under the same brand. It is here as an interfering agent: it keeps the sucrose from crystallizing so the candy sets glassy instead of grainy. Light Karo gives a cleaner result than dark.
- Moderate oven for the rice350F, five to eight minutes, spread in a single layer on a sheet pan. Crisping drives off absorbed moisture so the puffs stay crunchy under hot syrup; skipping it gives a soft, chewy candy.
- One package of puffed riceA period package was smaller than a modern box; the exact volume is not recorded. Start with about 6 cups and add until every puff is coated but the mass still holds together.
- Work fastAt 300F the syrup begins setting the moment it leaves the heat. Have the crisped rice, a buttered pan and a sturdy wooden spoon ready before you start boiling, and fold rather than stir hard so the puffs do not shatter.
- Yield and cuttingRoughly fills a buttered 9x13 pan. Press lightly with a buttered spatula, let cool ten minutes, then score into squares while still warm — once fully cold it breaks in shards rather than cutting.
Puffed rice was a novelty of the early twentieth century: the grain was exploded under pressure in sealed cylinders and shown to a mass audience at the 1904 St. Louis exposition. Quaker's "shot from guns" slogan belongs to later advertising rather than to the fair itself, but once adopted it stayed in the company's advertising for decades. Church and community cook books picked it up quickly, since a boxed cereal was cheap, shelf-stable and needed no grinding or soaking, and confections like this one gave a bake-sale table something bulky and showy for very little money. The technique is older than the ingredient — hard-crack syrup poured over popcorn, nuts or crackers is standard nineteenth-century candy practice — so what this recipe really records is a new commercial product being slotted into an existing formula. That it appears under "Cake Icings and Fillings" rather than a candy heading is typical of compiled parish books, where recipes landed wherever the collecting committee had room.