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Sultana Caramels
2 cups sugar 1/2 cup milk 1/4 cup butter 2 squares chocolate 1 teaspoon vanilla 1/2 cup English walnut or hickory nut meat, cut in pieces 2 tablespoons Sultana raisins Put butter into a saucepan; when melted, add sugar, milk, and molasses. Heat to boiling-point, and boil seven minutes. Add chocolate, and stir until chocolate is melted; then boil seven minutes longer. Remove from fire, beat until creamy, add nuts, raisins, and vanilla, and pour at once into a buttered tin. Cool slightly, and mark in squares. The nut meats and raisins may be omitted. 17% cups powdered sugar 1 cup maple syrup 1/2 cup cream
The page as printed has lost part of its ingredient list — the butter, sugar, milk and molasses called for in the method never appear with quantities, and the three lines at the end (powdered sugar, maple syrup, cream) belong to the recipe that follows. Treat what survives as a method rather than a complete formula.
- Missing quantitiesThe directions call for butter, sugar, milk and molasses, none of which are given amounts in this text. Any figure supplied here would be a guess; check a complete edition of the book before cooking, and disregard the powdered sugar, maple syrup and cream, which are a fragment of the next recipe.
- "2 squares chocolate"A square is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so two ounces total. Modern bars are often scored into half-ounce squares, so read the wrapper weight rather than counting squares.
- Sultana raisinsSold now as sultanas or golden raisins — seedless, pale, from white grapes. Two tablespoons is a token amount; the recipe itself says they may be omitted.
- Boiled seven minutes, twiceTimed boiling assumes a particular pan, burner and volume; period cooks also judged sugar by the cold-water test rather than the clock alone. A thermometer is the surer control: chewy caramels of this type finish in the firm-ball range, roughly 245-248F, and a degree or two decides between soft and tooth-breaking.
- "Beat until creamy"This is the hinge. Beating off the heat starts controlled crystallisation, which is what gives these their short, fudge-like chew rather than a clear glassy pull. Stop and pour the moment the gloss dulls and the mass thickens, or it sets in the pan.
- The buttered tinButter it generously, or line with parchment and butter that; caramel at this sugar concentration welds itself to bare metal.
- Marking in squaresScore while the slab is still warm and pliable, then cut through when cold. Cutting cold, unscored caramel shatters it along random lines.
- Yield and keepingYield depends on the pan and on quantities this text does not give. Wrap the pieces individually in waxed paper or they fuse together.
Fannie Merritt Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book devotes a long confections chapter to work that a generation earlier would have been bought from a confectioner. The word caramel here does not mean burnt sugar but the American confection — a boiled sugar and dairy chew, distinguished from taffy by the milk and from fudge by being cooked to a higher temperature. The name sultana is conventionally traced to the Turkish and Ottoman association of the word, and the fruit is often said to have reached New England kitchens through the dried-fruit trade out of Smyrna; by the 1890s they were a common enough grocery item that Farmer could name them in a title and expect to be understood. The closing note that the nuts and raisins "may be omitted" is characteristic of her method: one base formula, several finished sweets, and the reader trusted to choose.