Home › Frozen Dishes › Molasses Candy
Molasses Candy
2 cups molasses 2 cups brown sugar 1 cup water 2 tablespoons butter salt cup vinegar Boil ingredients until brittle when tried in cold water. Pour into hot buttered pan; pull when cool enough to handle.
A hard-crack taffy of the old pulling-party type. Everything hinges on the cold-water test, since the recipe gives neither temperature nor time.
- The temperature to aim for"Brittle when tried in cold water" is the hard-crack stage, 300-310F on a candy thermometer. A drop in ice water should shatter, not bend; anything softer and the candy will sag and stick instead of pulling.
- Ambiguous vinegarThe text reads "cup vinegar," apparently with a fraction lost in printing; 1/4 cup is the likeliest reading. Molasses candies of the period generally call for anywhere from a spoonful to a quarter-cup, and a full cup would be implausible. Vinegar is here as an acid to invert some of the sugar and discourage graining, so err low -- a couple of tablespoons -- rather than guessing high.
- SaltNo quantity given. A generous pinch, about 1/4 teaspoon, is in keeping with the period and enough to keep the molasses from tasting flat.
- MolassesUse light or dark molasses rather than blackstrap, which turns bitter at this concentration; unsulphured is easiest to find today. Sorghum syrup behaves similarly if you have it.
- The panA buttered marble slab or a heavy rimmed sheet pan works best; the batch needs to cool fast and evenly. Butter the surface heavily and butter your hands too, or the candy welds itself to both.
- PullingLet the mass cool at the edges, fold them in with a scraper, and start pulling when it can be handled at around 120F. Pull until it lightens to a tan gold and stiffens, then twist into a rope, cut with buttered shears, and wrap the pieces individually.
- WeatherSugar at this stage draws moisture from the air. On a humid day the candy will turn sticky within hours no matter how well it is cooked.
- YieldRoughly 2 pounds of finished candy, enough for four or five dozen pieces.
Molasses candy belongs to the American taffy pull, a social occasion as much as a confection: a batch was boiled, poured out, and divided among guests who buttered their hands and worked it in pairs until it lightened. Molasses was a cheap sweetener on the eastern seaboard for much of the nineteenth century, arriving as a byproduct of Caribbean sugar production, and it remained a common candy base in New England kitchens after granulated sugar became affordable. The vinegar is a piece of practical pre-scientific chemistry, used because it kept the batch smooth and not grainy. Lowney's, the Boston chocolate firm whose cookbook this is, published such collections to put its own cocoa and chocolate in domestic hands, though a general household book of the period would be expected to carry the standard confections too, chocolate or not.