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Laboratory Exercises (C granulated sugar C chopped)
1 C. granulated sugar 1/3 C. chopped peanuts 1. Heat the sugar in a granite pan until it is melted, stirring constantly. Be careful not to burn it. This is called caramelized sugar. 2. When sugar is melted add the chopped nuts and pour quickly onto a greased tin. 3. Mark into squares when slightly cool.
Note. One cup of peanuts in the shell will make one-third cup of shelled peanuts. English walnuts may be used instead of peanuts. One pound of walnuts in the shell will make 1 C. to 1½ C. walnut meats.
Butter Scotch. 2 C. brown sugar 1/4 C. Karo syrup 4 T. butter 3 T. vinegar 4 T. water 1. Mix ingredients in saucepan. 2. Stir until it boils, and then cook without stirring to the crack stage. 3. Pour into greased pan. 4. Cut into squares when cool.
Molasses Taffy. 2 C. brown sugar 2 T. vinegar 1 C. molasses 2 T. butter 1 t. soda 1. Melt butter in kettle; add remaining ingredients and boil without stirring to the crack stage. 2. Add soda, mix quickly and pour into buttered pans. 3. As it cools, fold the edges of the candy to the center of the plate. 4. When cool enough to handle, pull until almost white, then cut into sticks.
Popcorn Balls. 1 C. molasses 2 C. brown sugar 1 T. vinegar 1 t. soda popcorn 1. Follow directions for molasses taffy. 2. Just before removing from the fire, stir in enough popcorn to thicken it. 3. Dip up the mixture by the spoonful and roll into balls as soon as it is cool enough to handle. Then roll these balls over and over in kernels of popcorn until no more will adhere to the balls.
Note. Shelled peanuts mixed with the popcorn make a delicious "Cracker Jack."
Panocha. 2 C. brown sugar 1 C. cream or milk 2 T. butter 1 t. vanilla 1/2 C. chopped nuts 1. Cook sugar and cream and butter to soft ball test. 2. Set sauce pan in a pan of cold water until cool enough so that you can hold your hand on the bottom of the sauce pan. 3. Stir until the candy begins to thicken, add nuts and stir until it begins to sugar.
CANDY 4. Pour quickly on a buttered pan. 5. Cut in squares and cool.
Stuffed Dates. 2 lbs. dates 1/4 C. English walnut meats 1. Separate and wash dates. 2. Dry on a clean towel. 2 oz. peanut butter fondant 3. Cut through one side of each date, lengthwise, and remove seeds. 4. Fill the cavity in one-third of the dates with peanut butter and one-third with chopped English walnuts. 5. Roll pieces of fondant the shape and size of the date seed, and place in the cavities of the remaining dates. 6. Put 1/2 C. granulated sugar in a paper bag. Drop in a few of the stuffed dates at a time and shake until coated with sugar.
Uncooked Fondant.
C. cream 4 C. powdered sugar flavoring 1. Stir powdered sugar into the cream a spoonful at a time until thick enough to knead with the hands. 2. Work in the hands until smooth. Then separate into three or four pieces. 3. Work a few drops of a different flavoring extract into each piece. 4. Shape some of the cream into small balls and press half an English walnut kernel on each side. 5. Fill some seeded dates with cream. 6. Mix shredded cocoanut with some of the cream and form into balls.
Note. This makes a very good cream candy if used at once. It dries out and becomes hard on standing.
A candy unit from a domestic-science laboratory manual: seven exercises that together teach the sugar stages, from caramelization through crack to soft ball. Most of what needs translating is vocabulary and thermometer numbers, plus several fractions that dropped out of the text.
- Missing fractionsThe transcription has lost some fractions, leaving a bare "C." in the panocha nuts, the stuffed-date walnuts and fondant, the coating sugar, and the fondant cream. Read these as small quantities: about 1/2 cup nuts for the panocha, 1/2 to 1 cup walnut meats for the dates, roughly 1/2 cup cream to 4 cups powdered sugar for the fondant. The amounts are genuinely ambiguous as printed, so work by feel.
- Sugar stages in degrees"Crack stage" in books of this period means about 290F, and the hard crack that gives a snapping butterscotch is 300-310F. "Soft ball test" for the panocha is 234-240F. A candy thermometer replaces the cold-water tests entirely, though a bowl of ice water beside the pan is still the fastest confirmation.
- Granite panA granite or graniteware pan is speckled enamel over steel. Any heavy-bottomed saucepan works; for the dry caramel, choose one with a pale interior so you can judge the color, since dark cast iron hides the moment it turns from amber to burnt.
- Dry caramel is the hingeMelting a cup of sugar with no water goes from clear to acrid in seconds near the end. Keep the heat moderate, stir with a heatproof spatula, and pull it off the heat as soon as it is uniformly amber -- it continues to darken from residual heat. Have the nuts chopped and the tin greased before you start; there is no time to prepare them later.
- Karo syrupKaro was and is corn syrup; use light corn syrup here. Its function is to interfere with crystallization and keep the butterscotch smooth, so glucose syrup is a fair substitute but honey or maple syrup will change the flavor considerably.
- Soda in the taffyThe teaspoon of soda reacts with the vinegar and molasses to aerate the candy, which is what makes it pull white and chewable rather than glassy. Add it off the heat and stir only enough to distribute it -- the mixture will foam up sharply, so use a pan with a good deal of headroom.
- Pulling taffy safelyWait until the mass is genuinely comfortable to handle, not merely tolerable; candy at crack stage holds heat far longer than it looks. Buttered hands, not floured.
- Uncooked fondantThis is a raw cream-and-sugar paste with no cooking step. The book is right that it must be eaten at once, both because it hardens and because uncooked cream fondant will not keep -- make it the same day and refrigerate any leftovers.
- YieldEach of these makes a small plateful: roughly half a pound from the peanut brittle and on the order of a pound from the butterscotch or taffy. The popcorn balls cannot be counted, since the recipe calls only for 'enough popcorn to thicken it'. The stuffed dates, at 2 lb of fruit, are the outlier and will fill a large tray.
This page comes from the candy chapter of a school manual in household arts, and the layout gives away its purpose: seven short formulas, several of them a pretext for practicing a different sugar temperature. Domestic-science teaching in the early twentieth century leaned on candy precisely because sugar is a legible material -- a student can see caramelization happen and feel the difference between soft ball and crack, and the chemistry lesson comes with something to take home. The names record their origins loosely: panocha is from the Spanish for a cake of raw brown sugar, and appears in American books variously as penuche or panoche; butterscotch is generally traced to nineteenth-century Yorkshire, and the "scotch" has been explained as scoring or scotching the slab into squares rather than as a reference to Scotland, though the derivation is not settled. The note that peanuts mixed into popcorn balls make "a delicious Cracker Jack" is a period detail worth pausing on -- the trademarked confection was already familiar enough by then that a textbook could use it as a shorthand description rather than a brand.