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Martha Woolwine's Candy
2 cups brown sugar. 2 cups Caro syrup. 1 tablespoon vinegar. Cook until strings, then cool and pull.
Four ingredients and one sentence of instruction; everything here rests on reading the sugar correctly. This is pull taffy, and it needs a candy thermometer more than it needs anything else.
- "Until strings"The hinge of the recipe. Cook into the hard-ball range, roughly 250-265F, judged by a firm ball formed when a little syrup is dropped into cold water. Undercooked, the taffy will sag and stick; taken much beyond the hard-ball range it turns brittle and cracks instead of stretching.
- Caro syrupKaro, the light corn syrup brand, spelled by ear. Use light (clear) corn syrup; dark Karo will work but pushes the flavour toward molasses and the colour toward brown.
- What the vinegar doesIt is not for flavour. Acid inverts a portion of the sucrose during boiling, which keeps the finished candy from going grainy. A tablespoon in this volume is undetectable in the eating.
- Pan and volumeFour cups of sugar and syrup will foam and rise as they boil. Use a heavy pan with generous headroom -- 4 quarts is ample -- and do not stir once the sugar has dissolved.
- Cooling before pullingPour onto a buttered slab, marble or a rimmed sheet, and let it sit until the edges can be folded toward the centre with a scraper. It should be warm but handleable, roughly 110-120F. Pulling hot syrup is how people get burned.
- Buttered hands, not flouredButter the palms lightly and pull the mass into a rope, fold, and pull again. Eight to ten minutes of this works air in and turns the candy from dark amber to pale opaque tan, which is the sign it is done.
- Cutting and keepingTwist the finished rope thin and cut with buttered scissors, then wrap each piece in waxed paper. Unwrapped taffy welds itself into a single lump within a day, faster in humid weather.
- YieldRoughly 2 lb of candy, depending on how far it is boiled, cut into a great many small pieces.
Taffy pulls were a nineteenth-century American social form as much as a confection: the boiling was the smallest part of the evening, and the pulling, which takes two pairs of hands and produces sticky comedy, was the point. Recipes like this one often travelled by name rather than by book, which is why the contributor's name stands in the title. The corn syrup is the modern element here. Karo, a corn syrup marketed from the early years of the twentieth century, was promoted to home cooks as a cheap, reliable alternative to molasses and to boiled sugar syrups -- which may be why an old-fashioned pulled taffy arrives with a brand name spelled phonetically in the ingredient list.