Stick Candy
Make and boil the same as in the preceding receipt without the almonds. Pour the candy, or a portion of it, without stirring on to a marble slab. Drop flavoring over it when partly cooled, cut in strips and roll into round sticks.
A fragment that leans entirely on the recipe above it: boil the sugar syrup as for the almond candy, leave the nuts out, and work the sheet on marble while it is still pliable. Everything that matters here happens in the two or three minutes between pouring and the candy going stiff.
- The missing ingredientsBecause it refers back to "the preceding receipt," this page gives no quantities at all. Boiled-sugar candies of the period were made from sugar and water, sometimes with a little glucose or an acid such as cream of tartar to discourage graining, but without the earlier page you are working from general boiled-sugar practice, not from this text.
- The temperature the original assumesStick candy has to reach the hard-crack stage, 300-310F (149-154C). A degree or two low and the sticks stay tacky and bend in the jar. The receipt names no test, so use a thermometer.
- Do not stirThe instruction is literal and it is the hinge of the recipe. Agitating hot syrup seeds crystallization and the batch turns opaque and grainy instead of glassy. Once the sugar is dissolved, leave the spoon out of the pan entirely.
- The marble slabMarble is used because it pulls heat out fast and evenly. Lightly oil it, or work on a heavy silicone mat; a cold sheet pan will do at a pinch but the candy sets unevenly on thin metal.
- Flavoring"Drop flavoring over it when partly cooled" suggests candy oils rather than water-based extracts: alcohol-based extract largely flashes off in syrup this hot. Peppermint, wintergreen and lemon oil are the usual choices, added sparingly -- a fraction of a teaspoon per pound of sugar for the strong oils. Fold it in with an oiled bench scraper rather than stirring.
- Cutting and rollingYou have only a short window while the sheet is still pliable: too hot to touch bare-handed, too cool to shape once it stops sagging. Gloves are the practical answer, and a warm oven or heat lamp above the slab keeps the mass workable while you cut strips and roll them.
- WeatherBoiled sugar draws water out of the air. On a humid day the finished sticks go sticky within hours; wrap them individually in waxed paper or cellophane and keep them airtight.
Stick candy belongs to the era when a confectioner's stock in trade was boiled sugar worked by hand on a slab, and the same batch of syrup could become taffy, almond hardbake, drops or sticks depending on what was added and how it was pulled. That is exactly how this book presents it: as a variation on the receipt above, almonds omitted. The pale, striped peppermint stick most people picture was made by pulling part of the batch against a hook until it aerated and went white, then laying colored ropes along it before rolling -- a step this terse entry does not describe. Peppermint and wintergreen were common flavorings for such sticks, and the association of striped sticks with Christmas and the general store is largely a later American one.