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Walnut Candy
½ lb. granulated sugar ¼ lb. butter ¾ pt. condensed milk or cream 1/2 pt.
Florence Lovell. ½ pt. dark Karo syrup 1/2 lb. nuts Put all together. Stir constantly until hardens in water. Stir until cool and then add nuts and beat until creamy. 3 C sugar ¼ lb. butter 1/2 pt. cream
This is a boiled cream-and-syrup candy in the fudge and penuche family, thickened with corn syrup so it stays smooth. The written proportions are inconsistent in places, so treat the cold-water test, not the ingredient list, as your guide.
- "Until hardens in water"This is the cold-water test: drop a little syrup into a cup of cold water and judge the ball it forms. For a candy that beats creamy, you want firm-ball stage, roughly 244-248F on a thermometer. Soft ball (236-240F) gives a looser, more spoonable result.
- The hinge: cool before beatingThe instruction to stir until cool and only then beat is the whole recipe. Beating hot syrup throws large sugar crystals and the candy turns grainy; letting it drop to about 110F before working it gives the fine crystal that reads as creamy.
- Karo syrupDark Karo is a corn syrup with refiners' syrup added for colour and flavour, and is still on the market, though the modern formulation is not identical to the early-twentieth-century product. Its job here is to interfere with crystal growth; do not substitute an equal volume of sugar or the batch will set hard and sandy.
- Condensed milk or cream'Condensed milk' at this date usually meant the sweetened sort, though unsweetened evaporated milk was also sold under the name. If the sweetened kind is used the candy will be noticeably sweeter than with cream, and the milk solids will catch and scorch faster over direct heat.
- Proportions to weigh1 1/2 lb granulated sugar is about 3 1/2 cups; 1/4 lb butter is one stick. The syrup quantity as printed is out of proportion to the sugar for a candy of this type, and a smaller pour of syrup, on the order of a cup, is closer to standard practice for this quantity.
- Pan and stirringUse a heavy pan at least three times the volume of the mixture, since milk-and-syrup candy climbs sharply as it boils. Constant stirring is correct here because of the dairy, which will catch on the bottom otherwise.
- NutsHalf a pound of walnuts, coarsely broken. The recipe adds them once the mixture has cooled, before the final beating.
- Setting and yieldPour into a buttered pan, score while still warm, and cut when fully set. This is a large batch, and the yield will depend on how the syrup quantity is resolved.
Church and society cookbooks of the early twentieth century almost always carried a run of boiled candies, and walnut fudge of this kind sat squarely among them: cheap, keepable, and easy to make in quantity for a bazaar or social. Glucose syrups became a household staple in American kitchens after Karo was put on the market in the early 1900s, and cooks took to them quickly because they made candy-making forgiving in a way that pure sugar never was. The placement here under cake icings and fillings may say less about strict logic than about how such books came together; a cooked sugar mixture beaten to creaminess is, after all, only a step or two away from a boiled frosting.