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Chocolate Caramels
1 pound of sugar--either brown or white will do 1 ounce of butter. Half cup of milk. 2 ounces of grated chocolate. Vanilla flavoring. Set the milk, butter and sugar on to boil, and stir in the grated chocolate and flavoring. After that do not stir the mixture again or it will go to sugar in the dish. Boil about 10 minutes. When a drop in cold water sets rather hard but not brittle pour the candy into a dish well buttered. Make in little square blocks when set. Warm the dish or tin tray a little if the candy sticks.
A plain milk-and-sugar caramel with chocolate worked in — closer to a soft fudge than the chewy caramels of a modern candy box. The whole recipe turns on the cold-water test, so read that point first.
- The hinge: the cold-water stage"Rather hard but not brittle" points to the firm-to-hard-ball range, somewhere around 245-260F on a thermometer. Below that the squares will not hold a cut edge; much above it and you are into hard, snappable candy.
- Ten minutes is not a timeBoiling time depends on your pan width and burner. Expect anywhere from 8 to 20 minutes and judge only by the thermometer or the water test.
- Why not to stir"Go to sugar in the dish" means crystallise. Agitating a saturated syrup once it is boiling seeds crystals throughout, giving a grainy, sandy candy. Wipe stray crystals from the pan sides with a wet brush instead of stirring them in.
- QuantitiesA pound of granulated sugar is about 2 1/4 cups; a pound of packed brown sugar is also about 2 1/4 cups. One ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons. The half cup of milk can be treated as a modern half cup, though period cup measures varied.
- Grated chocolateIn this period this usually means unsweetened block chocolate, so 2 ounces of baking chocolate is a reasonable equivalent. Chopping it fine does the same work as grating; it melts into the hot syrup readily.
- Vanilla timingThe original adds flavouring at the start, and a long boil will drive off some of it. Stirring the vanilla in as you pour, or off the heat just before pouring, keeps more of it.
- Pan and cuttingAn 8-inch square pan, buttered, gives a slab roughly 3/8 to 1/2 inch thick. Score the surface into squares while the slab is still warm and firm, then cut through when fully cool.
- YieldRoughly a pound or a little more of finished candy; cut from an 8-inch pan into 1-inch squares that is around 60 pieces. Wrapped in waxed paper it keeps a week or two at room temperature.
Caramels were an American confectioner's staple by the late nineteenth century, and chocolate caramels sat conveniently between the two: chocolate was then sold largely as unsweetened blocks for drinking and baking, so melting it into a boiled sugar syrup was one straightforward way to eat it as a sweet. Milton Hershey built his first fortune on Lancaster caramels in the 1880s and 90s before turning to bars, which gives some sense of how commercially important this class of candy was. The instruction not to stir once the boil begins is one of the standing rules of sugar work, and "go to sugar" was a common way of saying the syrup crystallises back out, long before anyone explained it in terms of nucleation.