Marshmallows
2 cups sugar. 1 cup water. 3 small pinches cream tartar. 2 tablespoons gelatin soaked in 7 tablespoons water.
Put on to cook, when sugar threads beat in gelatin and when hard spread on marble with powdered sugar.
— Miss Randel'S Penoche
3 cups light brown sugar. 1 cup granulated sugar. 1 cup chopped nuts. 1 cup milk. 2 tablespoons butter. 1 teaspoon vanilla.
Cook sugar and milk until it forms soft ball between the fingers, when tried in cold water. Do not stir after it begins to boil. Remove from fire, add butter, letting it melt on top. When the outside of the saucepan feels cool, begin to beat the candy, adding nuts and flavoring. Beat until creamy and turn into buttered pan. If beaten too long, it will harden before it can be turned into the pan; in this case, a little more milk may be added to dissolve the sugar and made over; when cool, cut in squares.
Two candies run together on one page: an eggless gelatin marshmallow and Miss Randel's penoche (penuche). Both are sugar-boiling recipes written for a cook who judged doneness by hand, so a thermometer does most of the translating.
- "When sugar threads"The thread stage is 230-235F. For marshmallow that sets firm enough to cut, take the syrup to the top of that range or a few degrees past; below 230F the batch stays sticky and will not hold a square.
- The gelatin2 tablespoons is roughly 2 to 2.5 modern quarter-ounce envelopes. Soak it in the 7 tablespoons of cold water until it stiffens, then add it to the hot syrup off the heat and beat — pouring hot syrup onto dry gelatin gives you lumps that never disperse.
- Beating is the whole recipeNo time is given. Beat until the mixture turns white, thick and much increased in volume: roughly 8-12 minutes in a stand mixer with the whisk, longer by hand. Underbeaten marshmallow sets rubbery rather than light.
- No flavoring is listedThese marshmallows have nothing in them but sugar, water and gelatin. A teaspoon of vanilla beaten in at the end is a common addition; add it once the syrup has cooled somewhat so it does not flash off.
- The marble slabAn 8-inch square pan lined with parchment and dusted heavily with powdered sugar does the same job. Dust the top as well, let it stand uncovered several hours or overnight, then cut with a knife wiped in powdered sugar. Half powdered sugar and half cornstarch keeps the cut faces from weeping.
- Cream of tartarThe "three small pinches" are there to invert a little of the sugar and stop it crystallizing. About 1/8 teaspoon is the intent; it is not a leavener here and more is not better.
- Penoche: soft ball238F on a thermometer. The instruction not to stir after boiling begins is the hinge — stirring a hot supersaturated syrup seeds crystals and gives grainy candy. Wash sugar crystals down the pan side with a wet brush instead.
- Penoche: wait for the pan to cool"When the outside of the saucepan feels cool" means about 110F, lukewarm to the hand. Beating hot fudge is the commonest way to ruin it; beating it cool is what makes the fine crystals that read as creamy.
- YieldThe marshmallow fills an 8-inch square pan. The penoche is a large batch — four cups of sugar plus nuts — so allow a generously sized buttered pan and cut in squares when cool.
Marshmallow began as a genuine botanical preparation: the mucilaginous root of Althaea officinalis, marsh mallow, boiled with sugar as a throat and chest confection. By the time Mrs. Wilson was writing for the Philadelphia Public Ledger in the late 1910s, the root was long gone from the recipe and gelatin had taken over the job of holding air in a sugar syrup — this version does not even use egg white, which makes it a plainer, chewier sweet than the modern commercial kind. The penoche beside it is the same sugar chemistry pointed at a different result: brown sugar and milk boiled to soft ball and beaten cool, a fudge family that runs through American community cookbooks under spellings including penuche, panocha and penoche, the name generally traced to the Spanish panocha for raw or unrefined sugar. Both belong to a period when candy-making was a normal domestic skill and cooks read temperature off a bowl of cold water and their own fingertips.