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Plain Caramels
Two cups white sugar, ⅔ cup sweet milk and fill up with melted butter; 1 teaspoon of vanilla or lemon. Stir until it begins to boil, but not again. Cook until it turns a light brown (20 to 25 minutes). Pour out on buttered tins, and when partly cooled mark off in squares.
A short candy recipe written for a cook who already knew what caramel looked like in the pan. Two of its measurements need interpretation, and the one rule that decides success is buried in the middle.
- Do not stir after it boils"Stir until it begins to boil, but not again" is the hinge of the whole recipe. Agitating a hot sugar syrup seeds crystals, and the caramels turn grainy instead of chewy. Stir only until the sugar dissolves, then leave it alone; if you must move it, swirl the pan.
- "3/3 cup"Clearly a typesetting error. 2/3 cup is the likeliest reading, since two cups sugar to 2/3 cup milk is a normal ratio for a milk caramel.
- "Fill up with melted butter"This means pour melted butter into the same measuring cup until it reaches the full one-cup mark, which on the 2/3 cup reading is about 1/3 cup butter, roughly 5 tablespoons. The instruction is genuinely loose.
- Sweet milkOrdinary fresh whole milk, named to distinguish it from the soured or buttermilk that other recipes in these books call for. Whole milk gives a better chew than skim.
- Judge by temperature, not colour"Light brown" in 20 to 25 minutes is a working description, but the texture is set by temperature. A thermometer reading of about 245-250F gives a firm chewy caramel; below 240F they stay soft and sticky, above 255F they turn hard. Time varies with pan width and heat.
- Flavour at the endAdd the vanilla or lemon off the heat, after the syrup stops bubbling. Extract added early simply boils away.
- Pan and marking"Buttered tins" means a shallow buttered pan; an 8-inch square works for this quantity. Score the squares while the sheet is still warm and pliable, then cut through once cold, or it will crack unevenly.
- YieldAbout a pound of candy, or roughly three dozen small squares. Wrap them individually in waxed paper if they are to be stored, since cut caramel faces stick together.
- Pan size and scorchingUse a heavy saucepan at least three times the volume of the mixture. Milk sugars catch easily on a thin pan bottom, and once scorched the whole batch tastes of it.
Caramel takes its name through French caramel from Spanish caramelo, and the word originally described cooked sugar rather than the soft milk candy we now mean by it. Chewy caramels of this kind depend on milk or cream solids browning alongside the sugar, so they belong to the nineteenth century, when cheap refined white sugar and reliable fresh dairy came together in ordinary kitchens; before that, boiled-sugar sweets were mostly clear, brittle and flavoured with fruit or spice. Commercial milk caramels became a serious American business in the 1880s and 1890s, and Milton Hershey's Lancaster Caramel Company is the usual example cited. Home recipes like this one, printed by the hundred in community and promotional cookbooks of the period, gave a household the same confection for the price of sugar and butter, and the plainness in the title is doing real work: it marks this as the version without nuts, chocolate or cream.