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Chocolate Caramels
Two cups of molasses, 1 cup brown sugar, 1 cup cream or milk, 2 squares of chocolate, piece of butter size of an egg. Beat all together; boil with or without stirring until it hardens in water; turn into large, flat tins, well buttered. When nearly cold cut into small squares.
A straightforward molasses caramel with chocolate worked in, written for a cook who judged doneness by dropping syrup into cold water. A thermometer removes the guesswork.
- The hinge: cold-water test versus thermometer"until it hardens in water" points to the firm- to hard-ball stage, somewhere around 245-255F, which sets to a caramel you can chew. Boiled higher it grows progressively harder and more toffee-like; taken much below firm ball it may stay too soft to cut cleanly.
- Squares of chocolateA square is generally reckoned as one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so two squares is about 2 oz. Chop it before adding so it disperses; modern unsweetened baking bars are the nearest equivalent.
- Butter the size of an eggRoughly 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. Nineteenth-century butter was often salted, and a little salt suits this candy.
- MolassesUse ordinary unsulphured molasses rather than blackstrap, which is markedly more bitter and unlikely to be what was meant here. Two cups is a lot of sugar syrup with a strong scorching tendency.
- StirringThe "with or without stirring" is optimistic given the milk and molasses. Stir over low-to-medium heat with a heavy-bottomed pan; dairy and molasses both catch and burn, and burnt molasses taints the whole batch.
- Boil-over roomMilk and molasses foam hard. Use a pan at least four times the volume of the mixture, or you will lose it to the stovetop.
- The tinsA buttered 9-by-13-inch pan will give a slab of roughly a third to a half inch, depending on how far the syrup has reduced; the recipe assumes more than one flat tin. Line with buttered parchment if you want to lift the slab out whole for cutting.
- Cutting and yieldCut when nearly cold, while still pliable, with a buttered knife or oiled bench scraper; fully cold caramel resists the blade. Expect somewhere in the region of 60 to 80 small squares. Wrap each in waxed paper or they will fuse back into one mass.
Caramels of this kind belong to the American molasses-candy tradition rather than to the French caramel, and the chocolate is a late addition to a much older sweet. Household molasses was the cheap sweetener of nineteenth-century kitchens, and boiled molasses candy — taffy, pull candy, caramels — was a standard winter amusement long before chocolate was affordable in bar form. By the time collections like this one were being compiled, unsweetened baking chocolate in one-ounce squares was familiar enough that the recipe can call for "2 squares" and expect to be understood without further explanation. The instruction to boil "until it hardens in water" assumes something every cook of the period knew and few now practise: the cold-water test was the working standard in home kitchens well into the twentieth century.