Home › Confections › Maple Sugar Candy
Maple Sugar Candy
1 lb. soft maple sugar ¼ cup thin cream 1/4 cup boiling water 2 cup English walnut or pecan meat, cut in pieces Break sugar in pieces; put into a saucepan with cream and water. Bring to boiling-point, and boil until a soft ball Is formed when tried in cold water. Remove from fire, beat until creamy, add nut meat, and pour into a buttered tin. Cool slightly, and mark in squares. 2 cups sugar 1/2 cup milk 1/4 cup molasses 1/4 cup butter
A straightforward maple fudge that depends entirely on hitting the soft-ball stage and then beating it at the right moment. A candy thermometer removes all the guesswork the original leaves in.
- The hinge: soft ball, then cool before beatingSoft ball is 234-240F (112-116C); aim for 236F. Beating while the syrup is still hot gives coarse, gritty candy, so let it cool undisturbed until it is barely warm to the hand before you start working it, then beat until it loses its gloss and thickens. (The original says only "remove from fire, beat until creamy.")
- Soft maple sugarI.e. cake maple sugar still moist enough to break up easily, which is why the recipe says "break sugar in pieces." Hard granulated maple sugar works but takes longer to dissolve; add a spoonful more water and stir over low heat until no crystals remain before letting it boil.
- Thin creamPeriod thin cream is usually reckoned at roughly 18-20 percent fat, close to today's light cream. Half-and-half, or whole milk with a spoonful of heavy cream, is a workable substitute.
- Nut quantityThe recipe prints "2 cup" of nut meats, most likely two cups. That is a heavily nutted candy; if you want squares that cut more cleanly, halving the nuts works.
- English walnutSimply the common walnut, distinguished in period books from the native black walnut, which is far stronger in flavor. Toast the nuts briefly and let them cool before adding, or they will steam in the hot candy.
- Buttered tinAn 8-inch square pan is right for this quantity. Butter it well, or line with parchment and butter that; maple fudge grips a bare pan.
- Marking in squaresScore the surface while the candy is warm and just set, then cut through once it is fully firm. Cutting cold, unscored fudge crumbles it.
- YieldDepends on how many nuts you use; with the full two cups expect appreciably more than a pound of candy. Cut into squares of whatever size suits the pan. Keep in a tin between layers of waxed paper.
Maple sugar was the cheap sweetener of the northern countryside long before it became the luxury it is now: farms in Vermont, New Hampshire, upstate New York and Quebec boiled sap down to hard cakes that kept through the year, and cane sugar was the thing you bought. Fannie Farmer's confectionery chapter reflects the moment when that balance was tipping. By 1896 refined cane sugar was cheap and uniform, so maple appears here not as a household staple but as a flavor, one of a run of quickly boiled fudges and creams that a schoolgirl or a housewife could make in an afternoon without a copper kettle. The instruction to test in cold water rather than read a thermometer is period-typical; candy thermometers existed but were not yet standard household equipment, and cooks learned the stages by feel.