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Maple Sugar Candy
1 cup maple sugar cup water 1 tablespoon butter salt flavoring Boil until brittle, pour into greased pan, crease, and cool. One cup nut meats may be added just before pouring into pans.
A three-line hard-crack candy that assumes you know what "brittle" means at the sugar stage. Everything hinges on temperature, so use a thermometer rather than the book's eye.
- The missing water measureThe original reads "cup water" with the fraction apparently dropped in printing — most likely 1/2 cup, a common proportion in candy recipes of this type. Any amount between 1/3 and 1/2 cup will work, since all of it boils off; more water only means a longer boil.
- "Boil until brittle"This is the hard-crack stage, 300-310F. Without a thermometer, drop a little syrup into cold water: it should form threads that snap rather than bend. Below about 290F the candy will be chewy and will weep in humid weather.
- Maple sugarGranulated or block maple sugar, not maple syrup and not maple-flavoured cane sugar. If you substitute syrup you are changing the water content and the recipe stops being predictable; if you must, use syrup in place of the sugar and omit the added water.
- Salt and flavoringBoth are left to the cook. A generous pinch of salt and, if anything at all, a few drops of vanilla stirred in off the heat. Maple has enough character that most flavourings only muddy it.
- Do not stir, and watch the sidesOnce the sugar has dissolved, leave it alone and wash stray crystals down the pan wall with a wet brush. Stirring a maple syrup at high temperature is the quickest route to a grainy, seized batch.
- Creasing"Crease" appears to mean scoring the surface into squares with an oiled knife while the sheet is still warm and pliable, so it breaks cleanly later. Do it while the sheet is still soft enough to take the mark; wait too long and it will shatter at random like brittle.
- NutsWarm the nut meats first. A cup of cold nuts dropped into 300F syrup will pull the temperature down and stiffen the mass.
- Pan and yieldA greased 8-inch square pan gives a thin sheet; with the optional nuts the batch makes roughly 3/4 lb of candy, appreciably less without them. Store airtight — maple sugar candy picks up moisture from the air and goes sticky within a day in a damp kitchen.
Maple sugar was for a long time the cheaper sweetener in the northeastern United States and Canada, where a farm with a sugar bush produced its own supply each spring and sold or bartered the surplus; cane sugar had to be bought. Boiling the sap down past syrup to a hard candy is a long-established use of the sap, and the practice of pouring hot maple syrup onto clean snow to set is generally traced to Indigenous sugaring traditions of the Northeast, later taken up wholesale by settler households. Lowney's book, published by a Boston chocolate company, is heavy on confectionery because that was the trade it was advertising, and a maple recipe was an obvious inclusion for a New England audience. The terseness is typical of the period: a cook was assumed to know the cold-water test for sugar stages without being told.