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Popcorn Balls with Nuts
3 qts. popped corn 1 cup roasted peanuts 1 cup broken walnuts 1 tablespoon butter 1 cup molasses 1/2 cup sugar Remove from popped corn, all the kernels that have not popped. Mix in the peanuts and walnuts. Mix together the butter, molasses and sugar and boil until it is brittle when tested in cold water. Pour this over the popcorn and shape into balls.
A straightforward molasses candy poured over popped corn and nuts. The only technical step is the syrup, and it decides whether the balls hold together or slump.
- Cook the syrup to hard-crack"Brittle when tested in cold water" means the hard-crack stage, 300-310F on a candy thermometer. A drizzle into ice water should shatter rather than bend; molasses scorches easily past that point, so pull it as soon as it tests brittle.
- Quantities and yieldThree quarts of popped corn is roughly what a third of a cup of unpopped kernels gives. The recipe states no yield; with the nuts added, a dozen or so good-sized balls is a reasonable expectation, depending on how large you shape them.
- Molasses typeUse unsulphured light or dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter at this concentration. The recipe does not specify a grade.
- Warm the cornHold the popcorn and nuts in a low oven, around 200F, while the syrup cooks. Hot syrup hitting cold corn sets before you can coat it evenly.
- ShapingButter your hands well and work fast; the mixture is near 300F when poured and stays workable only a minute or two. Letting it cool briefly before pressing rather than rolling is easier on the hands.
- PeanutsRoasted peanuts here means salted or unsalted shelled nuts, not raw. A pinch of salt in the syrup sharpens the molasses if your peanuts are unsalted.
- KeepingWrap each ball in waxed paper once cool. They go sticky within a day or two in humid weather, so make them close to when they will be eaten.
Popcorn balls were a fixture of American holiday sweets, Christmas and Hallowe'en among them, from the later nineteenth century onward: cheap enough to make in quantity and sturdy enough to hang on a tree or hand out to visiting children. Molasses rather than corn syrup suggests an older formula, and it gives a darker, faintly bitter candy than the glassy white versions that followed. The addition of peanuts and walnuts pushes it toward the confectioner's end of things, closer to a brittle than a plain sugared corn ball.