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Chocolate Chips
1 cup molasses 2/3 cup sugar butter size of walnut vanilla Boil until hard. Pull thin. Cut in small pieces. When cold, dip in hot melted chocolate, flavored with vanilla. Either sweet or bitter chocolate may be used, but it must be melted over hot water.
This is a molasses taffy, pulled and cut, then enrobed in chocolate. The whole thing hinges on cooking the syrup far enough and melting the chocolate gently.
- Butter size of walnutAn old shorthand for roughly 1 to 2 tablespoons of butter.
- "Boil until hard"The recipe gives no temperature. Pulled molasses candy is generally taken into the crack stages, in the region of 270F: far enough to set hard when cool but not so far that it cannot be pulled. Test by dropping a little syrup into cold water. Molasses darkens as it cooks, so judge by the cold-water test rather than by colour.
- Vanilla quantityThe original gives none. A teaspoon in the candy and a few drops in the chocolate is in keeping; add it to the syrup only after it comes off the heat, or the alcohol carries the flavour away.
- PullingPour onto a buttered slab or sheet, let it cool until you can handle it with buttered hands, then pull until it lightens and becomes opaque. Pull to a rope no thicker than a pencil and cut with buttered scissors before it sets hard, which happens quickly.
- Melting over hot waterThe instruction is the important one. Set a bowl over water that has come off the boil, never over direct heat, and keep every drop of water out of the chocolate or it will seize. Take it off the heat while a few lumps remain and stir them out.
- Sweet or bitter chocolate"bitter" here is unsweetened baking chocolate, which against a very sweet molasses centre still works; modern 60-70 per cent dark is the easier choice.
- Dipping and settingDip only when the taffy is completely cold, as the recipe says, or the centre will soften and bleed. Set the dipped pieces on parchment in a cool room; if they are chilled hard in the refrigerator the chocolate is apt to bloom grey.
- Yield and keepingSomething under a pound of candy, the number of pieces depending on how small they are cut. Molasses taffy pulls moisture from the air, so store in a tin between layers of waxed paper and eat within a few days.
Molasses candy was among the cheapest sweets in the nineteenth-century American kitchen, and pulling it was a social occasion in its own right: the taffy pull, where the half-cooled batch was worked in buttered hands until it turned pale and satiny. What dates this version is the chocolate coating, which points to a later period than the pulled candy itself.