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Taffy
Put into a sauce pan 2 1/2 cups sugar and 1/2 cup water; stir until it dissolves; then wash the sides of the pan with a damp cloth and let the syrup boil without stirring until it reaches the soft ball stage (238 degrees F.). Add 1 tablespoon butter and 1/2 teaspoon lemon juice and boil to the hard crack (310 degrees F.); add 1 teaspoon vanilla and turn on an oiled slab or a tin to cool. Mark it off into squares before it becomes cold.
A straightforward boiled sugar candy, closer to a hard butter toffee than the soft pulled taffy of a candy pull. The temperatures given are accurate and should be trusted over any timing.
- The hinge: score it at the right momentMarking the squares is the whole trick. Wait until the sheet has set enough to hold a line but is still warm and slightly yielding — a few minutes on the slab — then press through nearly to the bottom with an oiled knife or bench scraper. Once it is cold it will shatter along its own faults instead of your lines.
- Use a thermometer, and calibrate it238F and 310F are real targets, not approximations. Check your thermometer in boiling water first: if it reads other than 212F at your altitude, shift both figures by the same difference. Above about 2,000 feet subtract roughly 2F per 1,000 feet.
- Why the pan gets washed downA damp cloth or pastry brush around the inside of the pan dissolves the sugar crystals splashed up the sides. A single stray crystal falling back into the syrup will seed the whole batch grainy. Do not stir after the sugar has dissolved, for the same reason.
- The two-stage boilButter and acid go in at soft ball rather than at the start; a little lemon juice inverts some of the sucrose, which helps discourage graininess, and butter added early risks scorching over the long climb to 310F.
- 310F is hard crackAt this point the syrup is near the edge of caramelising and will darken quickly. Pull the pan off the heat the moment the thermometer touches the number, and add the vanilla off the heat — it will steam and spit violently.
- The oiled slabA marble slab is ideal; a rimmed baking sheet is the practical substitute. A silicone mat works and needs no oil at all.
- Weather mattersSugar at this stage draws water from the air. On a humid day the squares will turn tacky within hours. Store them in a tin between sheets of waxed paper, and do not refrigerate.
- YieldTwo and a half cups of sugar gives roughly a pound of finished candy; how many one-inch squares that makes depends on how thickly it is poured.
Taffy in American usage covers a wide family of boiled sugar sweets, from the soft pulled candy of the nineteenth-century "taffy pull" to firm buttered slabs like this one, which the English would more readily call toffee; the two names are generally traced to the same root, though which came first is unsettled. What sets this version in its period is the parenthetical Fahrenheit readings. Home candy thermometers became common in American kitchens in the early twentieth century, and cookbooks of that generation delighted in replacing the old cold-water tests — the drop of syrup that forms a soft ball or cracks hard between the fingers — with a number, while often keeping the traditional stage names alongside.