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White Sugar Candy to Pull
1 pound of white sugar. A small half pint of water. A half teaspoonful of cream tartar. 1 ounce of butter Oil of peppermint or lemon or other flavoring. Boil all together, except the flavoring, about 15 minutes. Try by dropping a little in cold water. It must set hard to be done. Do not stir it at all, but pour on a buttered dish and flavor when cool enough to handle. Pull it till it is quite white.
A plain hard-crack pulled candy, of the sort that turns opaque white through aeration rather than through any added ingredient. The whole thing hangs on cooking the syrup high enough and never disturbing it.
- The hinge: do not stirOnce the sugar has dissolved, any agitation, or a stray sugar crystal on the side of the pan, will seed the whole batch and turn it grainy. Wash the pan sides down with a wet pastry brush during the boil and leave the syrup alone otherwise.
- "A small half pint"A half pint is 8 fl oz, so this means a scant cup of water to the pound of sugar. The exact amount matters little since it all boils off; the finishing temperature is what governs the result.
- Cold-water test, in degrees"Set hard" is the hard-crack stage, 300-310F (150-155C). A thermometer is more reliable than the drop test, but the drop should shatter between the fingers rather than bend.
- Fifteen minutes is approximateThe time depends on pan width and burner output. Go by temperature rather than the clock; a wide, shallow pan will reach hard crack appreciably faster than a narrow, deep one.
- Cream of tartarHalf a teaspoon per pound is doing real work here: it inverts a portion of the sucrose during boiling, which discourages crystallisation and keeps the pulled candy pliable rather than sandy.
- Flavouring oils"Oil of peppermint" is the concentrated essential oil, not an alcohol extract, and a few drops suffice for a pound of sugar. Alcohol-based extracts will spit on contact with hot sugar and largely flash off.
- Pouring and pullingButter the slab or sheet pan generously and use a buttered scraper to fold the cooling edges inward. Wait until it can be handled at all before pulling, and butter the hands; syrup at this temperature causes serious burns and clings.
- Yield and storageA pound of sugar gives a little over a pound of candy. Cut with scissors as the rope stiffens and store airtight, since the candy draws moisture from the air and turns sticky.
Pulled white candy of this kind sits between confectioner's work and parlour entertainment. The technique is old and simple: repeatedly stretching and folding a stiff sugar mass folds in air, and the millions of fine bubbles scatter light so that a clear amber syrup turns opaque and pearl-white. In nineteenth-century America the "taffy pull" or "candy pull" was a recognised social occasion, an evening's amusement for young people that produced something to eat at the end of it, and similar formulas were used in the commercial trade for stick candy and twists. Cream of tartar, a byproduct of winemaking, was a common household anti-crystallising agent before glucose syrup became cheap and widely available to bakers; recipe books of this period reach for it often in boiled sugar work. Jessup Whitehead's The American Pastry Cook was written for the hotel and bakery trade, which may explain the brevity here.