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Butter Taffy
1 cup molasses 1 cup sugar cup butter cup milk 1 tablespoon vanilla few grains salt Cook all ingredients until brittle when tried in cold water. Pour into hot buttered pans, crease, and cool. 2 cups sugar 1 cup water
A straightforward molasses taffy of the pull-and-crease type. Everything depends on reading the sugar stage correctly, since the original gives no thermometer reading.
- The hinge: the cold-water test"Brittle when tried in cold water" is the hard-crack stage, 300-310F on a candy thermometer. A drop spooned into ice water should shatter between your fingers rather than bend; if it forms a pliable thread you are at soft-crack and the taffy will stay tacky.
- Missing quantitiesThe butter and milk are given without their fractions; the lost characters stood in front of "cup" in each case, so both were fractions of a cup, but the figures cannot be recovered from this text. Treat whatever you use as a reconstruction rather than the book's own.
- Watch the milkBecause there is dairy in the pan, the mixture browns and can scorch well before hard-crack. Use a heavy saucepan, stir steadily once it thickens, and keep the heat moderate rather than fast.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and much darker at these temperatures. Sorghum syrup behaves similarly if you want a milder result.
- Vanilla timingA tablespoon is generous by modern habit, and some of its flavour will cook away at candy temperatures. Stir it in off the heat, along with the salt, just before pouring.
- Pans and creasingWarm, well-buttered shallow metal pans or a marble slab. "Crease" means scoring the sheet into squares with a buttered knife while it is still soft enough to mark but firm enough to hold the line, roughly a minute or two after pouring, so the cooled slab breaks cleanly.
- YieldRoughly a pound of candy, but with the butter and milk quantities missing this can only be an estimate; expect a few dozen small squares. Wrap in waxed paper; unwrapped pieces weld together in humid weather.
Molasses taffy belonged to the American winter kitchen long before it belonged to candy shops: the taffy pull was a standard parlor entertainment of the nineteenth century, cheap and easy to stage. The cook book is generally attributed to Lowney's, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and the candy chapters may well reflect a commercial interest in home sweet-making. Butter added to a molasses boil does two things at once, enriching the flavor and interfering just enough with crystal formation to keep the finished sheet glassy rather than grainy.