Candy Pudding
2 pints granulated sugar. 1/2 pint water. 2 tablespoons vinegar. 1 tiny pinch of soda.
Mix all together, put on low fire until thoroughly blended and sugar dissolved. Then cook quickly until brittle in cold water. Pour on greased marble, when cools a little, pull like taffy until light. Work into this one cup grated cocoanut, one cup seeded and chopped raisins, one cup almonds, one cup pecans cut in pieces. Make into ball, put in a mold lined with oil paper. Serve on platter, cover with melted chocolate.
A pulled hard-crack taffy loaded with fruit and nuts, pressed into a mold and coated in chocolate — closer to a nougat log than anything a modern cook would call pudding. The hinge is the cold-water test: the syrup must reach hard-crack or the finished ball will slump and weep.
- Pints are volume, not weight2 pints granulated sugar means 4 cups, roughly 1 lb 12 oz (800 g). The 1/2 pint of water is 1 cup. Measuring sugar by the pint was common in American recipes of this period.
- "Brittle in cold water" is 300-310FHard-crack stage: a drizzle of syrup dropped into cold water shatters between the fingers rather than bending. A thermometer is faster and more reliable than the water test, but the water test is what the recipe assumes.
- Vinegar and sodaThe vinegar inverts some of the sucrose so the batch stays pliable enough to pull instead of crystallizing in the pan. The pinch of soda neutralizes part of that acid and puts a little gas into the candy; that, together with the air worked in by hand, is what makes it go light and opaque.
- Dissolve before you boilThe instruction to hold it over a low fire until the sugar is thoroughly dissolved is not filler. Undissolved grains on the pan wall seed the whole batch and turn it grainy. Wash the sides down and do not stir once it boils.
- The marbleA marble slab pulls heat out of the sheet fast and evenly. A large oiled sheet pan or a silicone mat works, though the candy will cool more slowly and stay workable longer. Oil it lightly rather than buttering it, and wear cotton gloves — the mass is still hot enough to burn when it is ready to pull.
- Coconut"Grated cocoanut" may mean fresh coconut grated at home, which is moist and sweet, though packaged shredded coconut was already widely available. Unsweetened desiccated coconut is the nearest substitute; sweetened flake will push an already very sweet candy further.
- Almonds and pecansThe recipe does not say to toast them. Toasting both and chopping the almonds coarsely gives a better result, and dry warm nuts fold into hot candy more easily than cold ones.
- Oil paper and the moldOiled paper was the period lining; parchment is the modern equivalent. Any loaf pan lined with parchment will do; press the ball in while it is still warm and pliable, then let it set firm before turning out and coating.
- The chocolate coatMelted chocolate poured over a candy this sweet will set soft and streaky unless it is tempered, or unless you use a coating chocolate. The yield is generous, and it is best sliced thin.
Mary A. Wilson wrote for a Philadelphia readership in the years around the First World War, when she was closely associated with Federal food-conservation cookery, and her New Cook Book collects the sort of home confectionery that was still made in quantity at Christmas. Candy pudding belongs to the taffy-pulling tradition that ran through nineteenth-century American households and social gatherings: a hard-crack syrup worked by hand until it aerates and turns pale, a technique that predates any mechanical pulling hook and was as much an evening's entertainment as a cooking method. Calling the result a pudding is often said to reflect the older, looser sense of the word, something that turned out to be sliced at table, though that explanation is traditional rather than documented. The mixture of coconut, raisins, almonds and pecans is a fair portrait of what an American pantry could reach for by 1920.