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Maple Popcorn
I GALLON POPPED CORN, SALTED 2 CUPS MAPLE SYRUP 2 CUPS GRANULATED SUGAR I TEASPOON VINEGAR 2 TABLESPOONS BUTTER Stir sugar, maple syrup, and vinegar together, while heating slowly to boiling point, but do not stir after syrup boils. Cook to hard ball degree. Then stir in butter, pour syrup over popcorn, and mix well until every grain is coated. This makes a most flavorsome crackerjack, whether slapped into balls or bars or just eaten as is.
DRIED FRUITS Dried fruits are life savers for remote campers, and occasion savers for weekenders and vacationers dependent on a limited variety of food supplies. For they take the place of fresh fruits both in the balanced diet list and on the menu. It is as easy to carry a little of all of them as a lot of one of them, to avoid the monotony that easily becomes the curse of outdoor cookery.
Simple directions for soaking (or not) and cooking them are usually on the packages, for brands as well as kinds differ, and require individual handling.
Here are several general rules in case you've left the wrappers behind:
Rules for Dried Fruit Allow 2 cups water to 1 cup fruit, unless fruit has dried while in your possession, when more water will be needed.
A few grains of salt added to water helps the flavor. Allow 4 tablespoons sugar to 1 cup dried peaches or apricots, and 2 tablespoons for 1 cup prunes, none for cooked figs unless you wish to make a conserve out of them. Sweeten dried-applesauce to taste. Never add sugar before the last 10 minutes of cooking. After dried fruits are cooked, use like canned fruits for pies, puddings, gelatin desserts, in fact every fruit dessert you can make in your cook outfit.
Remember that raisins, currants, dates and figs turn leftover cereals into acceptable desserts. Just put them into what is left in the pot after breakfast and while cereal is still hot. (If the fruit has dried, freshen it in hot water for 2-3 minutes and drain. Cut dates and figs into convenient pieces with scissors or knife.) The spice assortment for fruits carries and keeps best if spices are whole. Use cellophane envelopes to hold whole cloves, cinnamon sticks, ginger root and a whole nutmeg. Break pieces off cinnamon sticks and ginger root, and scrape the nutmeg with a sharp knife. A little spice goes a long way, but it rings the much needed changes.
Pears accept the most spicing. Give them a lot of gingerthat is, a piece the size of the baby's finger and stick 1 clove in every third pear half. Then add a strip of lemon rind, and lemon juice to your taste, besides the usual amount of sugar.
If you can't carry fresh lemons and oranges with you, peel 1 lemon and 1 orange with a sharp knife, cutting peel so it comes off in a long neat spiral. Hang spirals up to dry, slip into separate cellophane envelopes, and take them along to season dried fruits and other desserts.
Jam may be made out of any dried fruit by cooking it, mashing or sieving it, and then cooking it down with sugar in the proportion of 3/4 cup sugar to 1 cup fruit pulp.
Jelly may be made out of dried apples. Cook them without too much water. Hang them in a cotton bag to drain off all juice, and then proceed as for any jelly-1 cup sugar to 1 cup juice. Cook to jellying point.
A straightforward hard-crack style candy coating, closer to old-fashioned caramel corn than to anything baked. The whole recipe turns on reading the sugar stage correctly.
- Hard ball, in numbers"Hard ball degree" is 250-266F on a candy thermometer; aim for the middle, around 255F. Below that the coating stays tacky and the balls slump; much above it you are into soft crack and the coating shatters off the corn.
- Do not stir after boilingThis is the hinge of the recipe. Stirring a boiling sugar syrup drags crystals down from the pan walls and seeds the whole batch grainy. Wash the sides down once with a wet brush and then leave it alone until the thermometer reads.
- What the vinegar doesA teaspoon of acid inverts part of the sucrose as it cooks, which is a second insurance policy against crystallisation. Cream of tartar or a little corn syrup does the same job; do not leave it out.
- A gallon of popped cornThat is about 16 cups, which comes from roughly half a cup of unpopped kernels. Salt it before the syrup goes on, as the original says, since nothing sticks to a glazed surface afterwards.
- Warm the cornCold popcorn chills the syrup on contact and you will be fighting stiff ribbons instead of coating grains. Hold the popped corn in a low oven, 200F, or in a warm pan while the syrup cooks, and mix in a bowl large enough to turn it freely.
- Maple syrupUse real syrup, and preferably a dark grade (sold today as Grade A Dark or Very Dark), since the lighter grades read faint under two cups of white sugar. Pancake syrup, being largely corn syrup and flavouring, gives a flat sweetness.
- ShapingButter your hands and work fast; the mass sets within a couple of minutes. For bars, press into a buttered pan and score while still warm rather than cutting cold, which cracks it.
- Yield and keepingEnough for eight to ten people as a snack, or about a dozen balls. Store airtight once fully cool, as the coating pulls moisture from the air and goes sticky within a day in humid weather.
Maple syrup plus popped corn is a pairing of two North American staples, and the book's cheerful comparison to "crackerjack" dates it: the Cracker Jack name was trademarked in the 1890s and the confection was widely sold in the decades that followed, and the lower-case "crackerjack" used here suggests the name was already doing duty as a general word for molasses- or caramel-glazed popcorn. Popcorn balls belong to the older home-candy tradition of church socials, Halloween and camp evenings, when a heavy pan and a fire were all the equipment on hand and doneness was judged by dropping syrup into cold water rather than by a thermometer. That this appears in an outdoor cookery book is telling: shelf-stable sugar, syrup and dry corn travel well and need no ice, which is exactly the logic that governs the rest of the chapter.