Pop-Corn Balls
Boil syrup molasses for twenty-five or thirty minutes; stir into it corn that has been carefully popped; pour out on buttered tins and with greased hands form into balls.
Puffed wheat and rice may be made into balls in the same way. 2 cups sugar
A loose-leaf page with a stray line at the end: the "2 cups sugar" belongs to an ingredient list that was never fully copied, so you are working from the method alone. The whole dish hinges on how hot the syrup gets, not on how long it boils.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockTwenty-five to thirty minutes is a guide only. Use a candy thermometer and take the syrup to the hard-ball stage, 250-265F, so the balls set firm rather than sagging into sticky lumps. A drop of syrup in cold water should form a ball that holds its shape and is still just pliable.
- "Syrup molasses"Most likely pouring molasses or cane syrup rather than blackstrap, which is bitter and will dominate. Modern unsulphured molasses works; a mix of molasses and light corn syrup gives a milder ball that is less prone to graining.
- The stray sugarTwo cups of sugar dissolved into roughly one cup of molasses with a few tablespoons of water is a workable proportion, but the original does not say so. Treat it as an inference rather than the author's instruction.
- Proportion of cornFigure about three to four quarts of popped corn to that quantity of syrup. Too little corn and the balls are candy with corn in it; too much and they will not hold together.
- Warm the cornPopped corn straight from a warm oven, around 200F, keeps the syrup fluid long enough to coat everything. Cold corn chills the syrup on contact and you lose half of it to the bottom of the bowl.
- Greased handsButter or a neutral oil on the palms is right, but the mass is near 250F when you shape it. Let it cool a minute or two, and work in small batches so the remainder does not set in the pan.
- Puffed wheat and riceThese absorb syrup faster and crush more easily than popcorn. Fold with a light hand and use slightly less syrup.
- Yield and keepingOn the inferred quantities above, roughly a dozen balls the size of a small orange. Wrap individually in waxed paper once cool; unwrapped, they weep and stick within a day, sooner in humid weather.
Molasses-bound popcorn balls were a fixture of American autumn and holiday cookery through the second half of the nineteenth century, when both popping corn and cheap cane syrup were household staples and confectionery still meant something made at home rather than bought in a wrapper. They belong to the same family as molasses taffy and the caramel-coated popcorn that became a commercial product in the 1890s. The passing mention of puffed wheat and rice dates the page: puffed cereals were a new industrial novelty in the early twentieth century, sold as a curiosity as much as a breakfast, and cookbook writers of the period were quick to slot them into recipes that already existed.