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Buttercups
1 cup brown sugar cup boiling water Cook all ingredients until brittle when tried in cold water. Pour on to hot buttered platter; pull when cool enough to handle; shape in a sheet two inches wide, cover with a layer of fondant, then with a layer of molasses candy, press together and cut in inch pieces.
A pulled brown-sugar candy assembled in layers with fondant and molasses candy, in the manner of old-fashioned striped or filled sticks. The whole thing turns on the sugar reaching hard-crack and on working it while it is still warm enough to bend.
- "Brittle when tried in cold water"This is the hard-crack stage, 300-310F on a candy thermometer. A drop spooned into cold water should shatter between the fingers rather than bend; anything softer and the finished pieces will slump and weep within a day.
- Proportion of waterThe original does not give a clear quantity for the boiling water; the fraction has dropped out of the text. A quarter to a third of a cup for a cup of sugar is enough to dissolve it, and all of it boils off again in any case.
- ButterDespite the name, no butter is listed in the ingredients as printed; the only butter the recipe calls for is on the platter.
- The platter must be hotA cold slab chills the edges of the syrup before the centre is workable and you end up pulling one part while another has already set. Warm the platter in the oven and butter it generously.
- PullingWait until the mass has cooled enough to handle but is still pliable - a minute or two too long and it will crack instead of stretching. Buttered hands, not floured; flour will grit the surface.
- The fondant and molasses layersBoth are separate preparations the book assumes you already have on hand. The fondant should be soft enough to spread but not runny, and the molasses candy pulled to the same working temperature as the brown-sugar sheet so the three layers bond rather than shear apart.
- CuttingCut with buttered scissors or a heavy oiled knife while the sheet is still warm. Once cold it will fracture unevenly.
- Storage and yieldStorage -- Wrap the pieces individually in waxed paper; brown sugar candy draws damp and the pieces will fuse in a tin.
Lowney's Cook Book was issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, at a time when boiled sugar work was still a normal parlour accomplishment. Buttercups belong to the family of pulled and layered candies - the same technique that produces striped sticks and filled humbugs - in which a brittle outer sheet is wrapped around a soft fondant core, sometimes with a contrasting molasses layer for colour and bite. Recipes of this kind assume the cook can judge sugar stages by the cold-water test; the household candy thermometer was available but by no means universal, and books of the period still describe temperature entirely by how a dropped bead behaves in a cup of water.