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Bean Taffy
1/2 cup beans 2 cups granulated sugar 1/2 cup water 1 tablespoon butter 1 cup milk Bean taffy easily takes first rank among all taffies--vegetable or otherwise. The taste is good beyond words, and consistency is pleasantly "chewey" without being tenacious to point of teeth pulling! Lima beans are best to use as basis because skins can easily be removed, but ordinarily, dried beans may be substituted if care is taken. Cover beans with cold water, let them stand over night; next morning boil them until soft and force through fine sieve to remove all skins. Boil together the sugar, water, butter and 1/2 cup beans prepared as above. After mixture has boiled thoroughly, add 1 cup of milk, adding milk 1/3 at a time. Stir mixture and let it boil a few minutes after each addition of milk. When thermometer registers (242 degrees F.), pour mass on to an oiled marble between oiled candy bars so that it will set about 1/4 in. thick. As with ordinary taffy, cut into pieces of desired size.
A soft-ball milk taffy thickened with sieved bean pur\a fat and starch behave like a caramel base. The recipe is workable as written, but a few of its measurements and vessels need translating.
- Which half cup of beansThe ingredient list says 1/2 cup beans and the method says to use 1/2 cup of the sieved purée, and the recipe never says whether the half cup is measured before or after cooking. Soak and boil enough dried lima beans to leave a full half cup of smooth purée after sieving -- that is a good deal less than half a cup of dried beans, since they swell as they soak and cook. The purée is what goes into the pan.
- Sieving is the hingeAny skin or grit left in the purée shows up as a gritty streak in the finished taffy and gives it a beany bite. Push the cooked beans through a fine sieve or food mill, not a blender, which chops skins rather than removing them.
- 242F is firm-ball242F sits at the top of the soft-ball range, on the edge of firm ball -- Use a clip-on candy or digital probe thermometer and calibrate it in boiling water first. At 242F the taffy sets chewy; take it higher and it sets progressively firmer, lower and it stays a sticky paste.
- Adding the milk in thirdsMilk sugars and proteins scorch easily, so each third must come back to a full boil before the next goes in, and the pan wants steady stirring from that point on. A heavy-bottomed pan of at least 2 quarts is needed; the mixture climbs when the milk hits the hot syrup.
- If you have no marble slabA large rimmed baking sheet, or a marble or granite counter, oiled with a neutral oil, works in place of the slab. The oiled "candy bars" are simply metal strips used to pen the syrup in; oiled metal rulers, or a sheet pan with a lip, control the 1/4 inch thickness just as well.
- Cutting and wrappingScore the sheet with an oiled knife or bench scraper while it is still warm and pliable, then cut along the lines as it cools; a milk taffy stays chewy rather than snapping. Wrap the pieces individually in waxed paper, as bean taffy draws moisture from the air and the pieces will fuse in a jar.
- YieldTwo cups of sugar with a cup of milk gives roughly a pound of candy, or about 40 to 50 small pieces cut from a quarter-inch sheet.
Bean candy sounds like a novelty, but the logic is old and sound: a starchy legume purée gives body and a faint nuttiness to boiled sugar, much as sweetened adzuki and white bean pastes have long done in Japanese and Chinese confectionery. Bean-based sweets of this kind turn up in American cookbooks in the era of the First World War food-conservation campaigns, when writers were pressed to stretch sugar, butter and wheat and to find new uses for dried beans, which were cheap, storable and promoted by the government. The tone of the headnote, insisting the taste is good "beyond words," suggests the author expected to have to argue the point.