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Buttercups
2 cups molasses 1 cup sugar 1/2 cup boiling water 2 tablespoons butter 1/3 teaspoon cream of tartar Fondant flavored with vanilla Boil ingredients (except fondant) until, when tried in cold water, a firm ball may be formed in the fingers, not stirring until the last few minutes of cooking. Pour on a buttered platter, and when cool enough to handle, pull until lightcolored. Shape on a floured board, having strip wide enough to enclose a roll of fondant one inch in diameter. Place fondant on candy, bring edges of candy together, and press firmly over fondant. With both hands pull candy into a long strip. Cut in small pieces; each piece will consist of fondant encircled with molasses candy. Care must be taken that candy is not cooked too long, as it should be soft rather than brittle.
The ingredient list as printed is scrambled and incomplete — the sugar has migrated to the end of the entry, and the molasses the instructions later name is missing altogether. Read the method first, then assemble.
- What the list omitsThe text calls the finished shell "molasses candy," so molasses is required, along with some liquid; neither appears in the printed list. The proportions cannot be recovered from the page. Use a current pulled-molasses-taffy formula if you want reliable results.
- Firm ball, in numbersA ball that holds its shape between the fingers in cold water is 244-250F on a candy thermometer. Overshoot and the strip turns brittle instead of chewy, which is the failure the last line warns about.
- Why you must not stirStirring a boiling sugar syrup throws crystals onto the pan sides and seeds graining. The instruction to leave it alone until the final minutes is the hinge of the recipe; the cream of tartar is there for the same reason, inverting part of the sucrose so the candy stays smooth and pliable.
- FondantFondant here means the plain cooked sugar paste made elsewhere in this chapter, kneaded to opacity and flavored with vanilla — not the rolled sheet fondant sold for cake covering. A stiff, well-ripened fondant rolls into the one-inch rope the recipe wants; commercial poured fondant is far too soft.
- Pulling temperatureWait until the slab is cool enough to handle, as the recipe says, but still warm throughout. Too hot and it sticks and burns the hands; too cool and it tears rather than aerating to the pale color that signals enough pulling.
- Buttered platter, floured boardThe platter is buttered so the mass releases; the board is floured only lightly, to keep the rope from gluing itself down. Excess flour can show as streaks in the finished pieces.
- Cutting and keepingCut with buttered scissors or a bench scraper as the rope cools, since it firms quickly. Wrap each piece in waxed paper — unwrapped, the candy draws moisture from the air and the pieces tend to stick together.
Buttercups belong to the American pulled-candy tradition that flourished in the nineteenth century around the candy pull, a domestic entertainment in which molasses taffy was boiled, cooled on a buttered platter and worked in pairs until it lightened. The name is often said to describe the look of the cut pieces: a pale creamy center showing inside a darker collar, like the eye of a flower. Their appearance in the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book reflects the book's method of building a confectionery chapter on two foundations " a a cooked sugar syrup and a batch of fondant " and then combining them in variations, so that fondant made once serves as the filling for a dozen sweets. Cream of tartar was commonly used in households to keep boiled sugar from graining before commercial glucose and corn syrup became common pantry items, and its presence in so small a quantity here, a third of a teaspoon, is characteristic of the precise measurement this book did much to popularize.