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Candy (Put the molasses sugar)
Put the molasses, sugar and vinegar in a pan and boil until the mixture hardens when dropped into cold water. Pour into buttered pans; mark into squares and set aside to harden; or cool slightly: butter the hands and pull the candy until it is light.
This is molasses taffy, given in the shorthand of a book that assumed you knew the proportions. The ingredient quantities are missing from this leaf, so treat it as a method rather than a formula.
- Missing quantitiesNo amounts are given for molasses, sugar or vinegar. A common period ratio for this style of taffy is roughly equal parts molasses and sugar with a tablespoon or two of vinegar, but this leaf does not say so and any figure here would be invention.
- What "hardens in cold water" meansThe recipe gives no temperature. Candy that hardens when dropped into cold water is in the crack stages; pulled molasses taffy is usually taken to about 260-270F (soft crack), while a batch meant to be marked into squares and left brittle goes higher, towards 300F. A drop in cold water should form a thread that hardens rather than flattening.
- The vinegar is doing workIt is an acid that inverts part of the sucrose, which keeps the batch from crystallising into grain. Do not leave it out on the theory that it is a flavouring.
- Molasses type"Molasses" in period American recipes generally meant a lighter cane molasses rather than modern blackstrap. Blackstrap is far more bitter and will dominate the finished candy.
- Do not stir after boiling startsStir only until the sugar dissolves. Agitation past that point, or crystals left on the pan wall, seeds the whole batch. Wash the sides down with a wet brush.
- Buttered pans and buttered handsUse a heavy pan; sugar at 300F scorches instantly in thin aluminium. Pour onto a buttered rimmed sheet or marble slab, and let the mass cool until it can be handled before pulling. Sugar at that temperature causes serious burns.
- PullingFold and stretch repeatedly for eight to ten minutes. The candy goes from dark and translucent to pale, opaque and satiny as air works into it, which is what the recipe means by "light." Twist into a rope and cut with buttered scissors.
- Yield and keepingSince the leaf gives no quantities, any yield is an estimate: about two cups of combined sugar and molasses would give in the region of a pound of candy. Wrap pieces individually in wax paper; unwrapped taffy absorbs moisture and welds itself into a single lump.
Pulled molasses candy was the centrepiece of the American "taffy pull," a nineteenth-century social evening in which the cooling candy was passed between pairs of buttered hands until it lightened, a chore that conveniently required two people standing close together. Molasses was the cheap sweetener of the period, a byproduct of cane refining that reached northern kitchens in barrels long before granulated white sugar became affordable, and recipes of this kind bridge the two by using both. Stripped down to a single method paragraph with no quantities, it suggests a formula so familiar that the compiler expected the cook to supply the proportions from memory.