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Daisy's Cream Candy
3 pints sugar. 1 pint boiling water. 1 teaspoon vinegar. 3 teaspoons cream or rich milk. Pinch salt.
Cook until forms a hard ball in cold water. Turn out on greased marble, flavor with vanilla or cinnamon. Pull until begins to look creamy; cut in pieces with scissors. Make cream icing, and when taken from fire add cocoanut and drop on wax paper.
A pulled sugar candy of the old school: boiled hard, worked on a slab until it turns opaque and satiny, then snipped into pillows that soften over a day or two. The measurements are by volume, and the last sentence belongs to a different sweet.
- The stray final sentence"Make cream icing, and when taken from fire add cocoanut and drop on wax paper" has nothing to do with the pulled candy; it belongs to a separate coconut-cream drop, and how it came to be printed here is not known. Ignore it and stop after cutting the candy.
- Sugar by the pintGranulated sugar was measured by volume: 3 pints is 6 cups, roughly 2 lb 10 oz. The 1 pint of boiling water is 2 cups — 3:1 by volume, so a fair length of boiling is needed to reach hard ball.
- "A hard ball in cold water"250–266F on a thermometer. Below that the candy will not hold a pull and stays sticky; much above it and you are in soft-crack territory and the batch turns brittle rather than creamy.
- Why vinegar and cream are thereThe teaspoon of vinegar inverts a little of the sugar so it resists graining, and the few teaspoons of cream contribute milk solids and a trace of fat. The opaque, creamy look comes chiefly from the pulling itself, which works air into the candy.
- Marble, and the alternativeA greased marble slab pulls heat out fast so the edges of the pool set enough to handle. A heavy rimmed baking sheet, buttered, will do; avoid thin nonstick pans, which flex and scorch.
- PullingLet the sheet of syrup cool at the edges, fold them in with a scraper, and start pulling only when it can be held — buttered hands, and take it in short pulls rather than long ropes. It goes from clear to pearly in three to five minutes of work; stop as soon as it stiffens, or it will crumble instead of stretching.
- FlavoringAdd the vanilla or cinnamon oil as the syrup hits the slab, not into the boiling pan, where volatile flavor cooks off. Ground cinnamon will make it gritty; use cinnamon oil or extract, a few drops only.
- WeatherPulled candy fails on a humid day. Boiled sugar draws water from the air and the finished pieces go slack and weep. Work in a dry room and store the cut candy airtight, layered in waxed paper.
- YieldClose to 3 lb of candy (the sugar alone weighs about 2 lb 10 oz), cut into small pieces with scissors. It is at its best after a day or so in a tin, when the interior creams down and softens.
Pulled cream candy of this kind has long been associated with the American South and with Christmas in particular, where a family would boil a batch and everyone with clean hands took a share of the pulling; the same technique, minus the milk, produces taffy and molasses candy. Sugar boiling of this kind was one of the few genuinely showy things a home cook could do before the spread of the candy thermometer, and the cold-water test given here — a drop of syrup into a cup, judged by the ball it forms between the fingers — remained the common measure in home kitchens into the 1920s.