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Chocolate Caramels
2½ tablespoons butter 2 cups molasses 1 cup brown sugar 1/2 cup milk 3 squares unsweetened chocolate 1 teaspoon vanilla Put butter into kettle; when melted, add molasses, sugar, and milk. Stir until sugar is dissolved, and when boiling-point is reached, add chocolate, stirring constantly until chocolate is melted. Boil until, when tried in cold water, a firm ball may be formed in the fingers. Add vanilla just after taking from fire. Turn into a buttered pan, cool, and mark in small squares.
A molasses-based caramel from the confectionery chapter, cooked to the firm-ball stage without a thermometer. The whole recipe hinges on reading that stage correctly.
- The butter quantity is unreliableThe printed figure for butter is out of proportion to two cups of molasses and a cup of sugar and cannot be taken at face value; a small quantity of a few tablespoons is the plausible working amount.
- Firm ball means 245-250FA firm ball that holds its shape between the fingers in cold water corresponds to roughly 245-250F on a candy thermometer. Below that the squares will slump at room temperature; boiled well past it the mixture moves through the hard-ball and crack stages and the caramels turn brittle.
- Squares of chocolateOne square of unsweetened baking chocolate is one ounce, so three squares is 3 oz. Unsweetened is essential here, since the molasses and brown sugar carry all the sweetness.
- Molasses scorchesUse a heavy pan at least three times the volume of the mixture: molasses foams high as it approaches the caramel stages. Stir down to the bottom throughout, since the milk solids and molasses catch and burn quickly once the mixture is boiling hard.
- KettleIn this book a kettle is a deep, heavy saucepan or preserving pan, not a tea kettle.
- Pan size and markingAn 8-inch square pan gives caramels about a half-inch thick. Score the surface into squares while the slab is still warm and firm but not fully set, then cut through when cold; cutting a fully cooled slab tends to crack it.
- Yield and keepingExpect roughly 60 to 70 one-inch caramels. Wrap each in waxed paper once cold, or they are likely to stick together into a mass.
Molasses was the everyday sweetener of New England kitchens long after refined sugar became affordable, and the confectionery chapters of nineteenth-century American cookbooks are full of it: molasses candy, taffy pulls, and caramels like this one. The caramel proper -- a boiled sugar sweet enriched with butter and milk so that it stays chewy rather than setting hard -- became a commercial American confection in the second half of the 1800s. Their appearance in a cooking school text reflects the era's confidence that candy-making was a teachable domestic skill, tested not by instrument but by the cold-water method, which any student could learn to read with her fingers.