Caramels
2 cups brown sugar. 1 cup cream. 3 tablespoons butter. 1/2 cup chocolate. Let cook until thick, add butter and chocolate. Remove from fire and beat a long time before pouring out in greased pan.
A terse turn-of-the-century candy formula that assumes you already know how to cook sugar. The critical information it omits is the temperature, and without it the batch is a coin toss.
- Cook to a number"Until thick" is best read as the firm-ball stage, roughly 245-250F on a candy thermometer, for caramels that hold a cut edge but still chew. Much below 240F they tend to stay soft; much above 255F they go hard.
- The half cup of chocolateThis means unsweetened baking chocolate, sold in one-ounce squares and grated or chopped before measuring. Half a cup of grated chocolate is roughly two ounces; modern semisweet chips will make the batch noticeably sweeter.
- CreamUse heavy cream, 36 percent fat or better. Period "cream" was rich and unhomogenized, and the fat is what keeps the finished caramel from turning brittle and sandy.
- Order of operationsCook the sugar and cream together first, then add butter and chocolate off or near the end of the heat, as written. Adding cold butter to a boiling syrup will drop the temperature sharply, so check the thermometer again before pouring.
- About the beatingBeating hot sugar syrup deliberately encourages small crystals, which is why this recipe produces something closer to a soft chocolate fudge caramel than the clear, chewy modern caramel. If you want the smooth chewy kind, skip the beating and pour immediately; if you want what Mrs. Wilson meant, beat until the gloss dulls.
- The panGrease an 8-inch square pan for a thick slab, or a 9-inch for thinner squares. Line it with buttered parchment and the whole sheet lifts out for cutting.
- Yield and storageSomething over a pound, cut into roughly three dozen small pieces. Wrap each in waxed paper or they will fuse into a single mass within a day.
- Watch the scorchBrown sugar and dairy together catch on the bottom of a thin pan quickly. Use a heavy saucepan at least three times the volume of the mixture, since it climbs when it boils.
Mrs. Wilson's cookbook came out of her newspaper column work and wartime food-conservation writing, and its brevity is characteristic: a recipe could be eight lines long and still be considered complete. Caramels themselves belong to the great American candy boom of the late nineteenth century, when cheap refined sugar and reliable ranges put confectionery that had been a shop luxury within reach of the home kitchen. Chocolate caramels in particular were a commercial staple before they were a household one; Milton Hershey is generally credited with building his first fortune on caramels in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and only later turned to milk chocolate. Recipes like this one are the domestic echo of that trade, translating a candy-store product into two cups of brown sugar and a saucepan.