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Butter Taffy
2 cups light brown sugar ¼ cup molasses 2 tablespoons vinegar 2 tablespoons water ⅞ teaspoon salt 1/4 cup butter 2 teaspoons vanilla Boil first five ingredients until, when tried in cold water mixture will become brittle. When nearly done, add butter, and just before turning into pan, vanilla. Cool, and mark in squares.
A straightforward hard-crack candy that predates the home thermometer. The cold-water test still works, but a thermometer removes the guesswork.
- The hinge: hard-crack stage"Brittle" in cold water means 300-310F on a candy thermometer. Below that the taffy stays tacky and pulls fillings out of teeth; above 315F the brown sugar and molasses scorch and turn bitter.
- Molasses quantityThe molasses measure is printed ambiguously in the original; a quarter cup is the most likely reading.
- Why the vinegarAcid inverts some of the sucrose as the syrup boils, which discourages the batch from crystallizing into a grainy mass. Do not leave it out, and avoid stirring the boiling syrup beyond working in the butter at the end.
- Butter timingAdding the butter near the end may be to keep the milk solids from scorching over the long boil. Stir it in gently and let the syrup return to temperature.
- Vanilla lastVanilla extract is largely alcohol and water, and its aromatics are volatile at candy temperatures. Adding it at the very end, just before pouring, keeps more of the flavor in the candy.
- The panUse a buttered rimmed sheet or a buttered 9x13 pan. Use a deep, heavy saucepan with plenty of headroom, as brown sugar and molasses foam up sharply.
- Marking in squaresScore with a buttered knife or bench scraper when the surface has set but the slab is still warm and yielding, roughly five to ten minutes. Wait until cold and it shatters at random.
- Yield and keepingRoughly a pound and a quarter of candy; the number of one-inch squares depends on how thickly you pour the slab. Wrap the pieces individually in waxed paper; unwrapped taffy pulls moisture from the air and goes sticky within a day.
Taffy in nineteenth-century American cookbooks covers a wide family of boiled sugar candies, some pulled while warm until pale and aerated, others simply poured out, cooled and cracked into pieces as here. The molasses and brown sugar version is the older and plainer line, from a period when the darker grades of sugar were cheaper than fully refined white and molasses was a common pantry sweetener. Candy recipes of this era were written for cooks working without thermometers, which is why the cold-water test appears throughout: a drop of syrup in a cup of cold water, judged by feel, was the standard instrument of the home kitchen. The butter here does double duty, softening the snap slightly and supplying the caramelized dairy flavor the name promises.