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Rich Chocolate Caramels
2 tablespoons butter 1/2 cup milk 1/2 cup sugar 1 cup molasses 4 squares chocolate 1 cup walnut meats, broken in pieces 2 teaspoons vanilla Put butter in saucepan and when melted add milk, sugar and molasses. When boiling-point is reached add chocolate, and cook until brittle when tried in cold water, stirring occasionally to prevent mixture from adhering to pan. Remove from fire, beat three minutes, add nut meats and vanilla, and turn into a buttered pan. When cold cut in squares and wrap in paraffine paper.
A small-batch molasses caramel from the confections chapter, workable today with a thermometer and one decision made up front: how hard you want the finished candy.
- The hinge: read "brittle" carefullyCooked until a dropped bead turns brittle in cold water, this sets as a hard, snappable sheet rather than a chewy caramel. For the chew most people expect, pull the pan at 248-252F (firm ball); for the brittle texture the original describes, carry it to about 300F.
- Squares of chocolateFour squares means 4 oz unsweetened baking chocolate, the one-ounce squares standard in American groceries at the time. Chips or bittersweet bars will change both the sweetness and the set.
- MolassesUse an ordinary unsulphured baking molasses. Blackstrap is far more bitter and mineral than what the book assumed and will dominate the chocolate.
- Stray digit in the ingredientsThe lone "1" at the head of the list appears to be a transcription artifact rather than a quantity; read the butter as 2 tablespoons.
- Milk and molasses scorchDairy and molasses sugars both catch on the bottom well before the finish. Use a heavy saucepan at least three times the volume of the mixture and stir often near the end; the mixture may bubble up when the chocolate goes in.
- Beating three minutesThis is off the heat, as the recipe specifies, and is likely what keeps the candy from setting glassy. Do it briskly with a wooden spoon, then get the nuts and vanilla in and the mixture into the pan before it stiffens.
- Pan and yieldAn 8-inch square pan gives a thin sheet; a loaf pan or 6-inch square gives a proper thick caramel. Expect somewhat over a pound of candy, cut into whatever size squares the sheet allows.
- Paraffine paperWaxed paper. Cut squares of it and twist the ends; wrapping matters because molasses caramels weep and stick to each other within a day in humid weather.
Chocolate caramels of this kind belong to the late-nineteenth-century American boom in home candy-making, when cheap refined sugar, cane molasses and bulk baking chocolate put confections that had been a confectioner's trade within reach of a domestic kitchen. Farmer's confections chapter treats the cold-water test as the working cook's thermometer, listing the stages by how a dropped bead behaves; candy thermometers existed but were not yet standard household equipment. The molasses here is doing double duty, contributing both flavour and the invert sugar that keeps the finished sheet from turning grainy, a role modern recipes usually hand to corn syrup.