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Candy (Pound granulated sugar cup)
1 pound granulated sugar 1 cup water 1 teaspoon vinegar 12 drops oil of cinnamon Boil the mixture until a little of it hardens when dropped in cold water; pour into shallow buttered tins and stand them in cold water, turning the edge of the candy until it cools. Add the oil of cinnamon; pull until white and put in a cool place to harden. When cold pack in an airtight vessel and leave over night.
A pulled cinnamon hard candy of the taffy-pull school, written for cooks who judged sugar by the cold-water test rather than a thermometer. The instructions are slightly out of order, and that is the first thing to sort out.
- The order of operationsAs printed, the oil of cinnamon is added after the syrup has been poured and cooled at the edges, though it is listed among the ingredients. Flavoring oils are volatile and bitter when scorched, so they go in off the heat: pull the pan from the burner, stir the oil through, and pour at once.
- "Hardens when dropped in cold water"The recipe names no stage and no temperature. For a candy meant to pull hard and stay hard, this points to the hard-crack range, around 300-310F, where a drop shatters between the fingers rather than bending. Stopped short, at soft-crack, the candy will pull beautifully and then turn sticky within a day.
- QuantitiesA pound of granulated sugar is about 2 1/4 cups. The 1 cup water and 1 teaspoon vinegar are unchanged. The vinegar inverts a portion of the sugar and is what keeps the batch from seizing into grain while it is worked.
- Oil of cinnamonThis is cinnamon essential oil, not extract and not ground spice. Buy a food-grade candy flavoring oil; twelve drops is strong but plausible for a pound of sugar, since the pulling drives off some of it. Most modern bottles sold as cinnamon oil contain cassia oil.
- The cooling bathStanding the buttered tins in cold water sets the edges fast. Keep folding those cooled edges toward the center with an oiled scraper so the mass cools evenly; if the middle stays molten while the rim goes brittle, it will not pull.
- PullingWork it when it is hot enough to hurt but cool enough to handle -- buttered hands and heavy gloves. Pulling aerates the candy and turns it from clear amber to opaque satin white, which is what "pull until white" means. Ten minutes is usually enough.
- Cutting and storingDraw the pulled rope out to finger thickness and cut with oiled shears while it is still pliable; it sets hard within a few minutes. The overnight rest in an airtight tin lets the surface cure. Humidity is the enemy -- do not make this on a wet day, and layer the pieces with waxed paper.
- YieldAbout one pound of finished candy, roughly 60 to 70 small pieces.
Pulled hard candy belongs to the era when sugar-boiling was a parlor amusement as much as a kitchen task: taffy pulls and candy pulls were a standard American winter entertainment through the nineteenth century, and cookbooks of the period assume a household with spare hands to do the work. Cinnamon was often said to be among the popular flavors for the clear or white pulled sticks sold by confectioners, alongside peppermint and wintergreen, all of them relying on distilled essential oils that were by then more widely available. The absence of a thermometer here is telling -- the cold-water test was still the working standard in domestic kitchens, and the brief unfussy directions were aimed at cooks who already knew what the hard-crack stage looked like in a cup of cold water. The vinegar is the one piece of chemistry in the recipe: acid splits some sucrose into glucose and fructose, which is the old cook's insurance against a grainy batch, and it does the same job as the corn syrup a modern candy recipe would call for.