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Vinegar Candy
2 cups sugar. 1/2 cup vinegar 2 tablespoons butter Put butter into kettle; when melted, add sugar and vinegar. Stir until sugar is dissolved, afterwards occasionally. Boil until, when tried in cold water, mixture will become brittle. Turn on a buttered platter to cool. Pull, and cut same as Molasses Candy.
A hard-crack pulled candy of the taffy-pull era. Everything depends on the finish temperature and on resisting the urge to keep stirring.
- The missing sugarThe ingredient list as printed gives only vinegar and butter, though the method calls for sugar. Other editions of this recipe use 2 cups granulated sugar to 1/2 cup vinegar; the quantity here is genuinely absent from the text rather than something to be deduced from it.
- KettleIn nineteenth-century American cookbooks 'kettle' generally means an open pot or saucepan rather than a covered vessel with a spout. Use a heavy pan of at least 2-quart capacity, since boiling sugar climbs.
- The cold-water test in numbers"Brittle" when dropped into cold water is the hard-crack stage, 300-310F. A thermometer is more reliable than the spoon-and-water method, but the water test still works as a check: the thread should snap rather than bend.
- Stop stirringStirring -- the recipe says to stir until the sugar dissolves and only occasionally after that. Stirring a boiling syrup repeatedly can drag crystals down from the pan wall and seed the batch into grain, so keep the later stirring to a minimum and wash the sides down with a wet brush.
- Why vinegarThe acid inverts part of the sucrose as it boils, which helps keep the candy from setting grainy. Any ordinary cider or white vinegar of the sort then sold will do; the recipe does not specify a kind or strength.
- Cooling and pullingA buttered marble slab or a heavy buttered sheet pan works better than a platter. Let the mass cool until it holds a dent under a fingertip, work the edges to the middle, then pull with buttered hands until it lightens and stiffens; cut with scissors into pieces and wrap.
- WeatherPulled candy takes up moisture from the air and turns sticky. A dry day, and airtight storage in wax paper, make the difference between candy that keeps a week and candy that slumps overnight.
- YieldTwo cups of sugar makes something close to a pound of finished candy, depending on how much is lost to the pan and trimming.
Pulled candies were social events as much as recipes in nineteenth-century America: the taffy pull, at which cooled sugar was worked between buttered hands by pairs of guests, appears constantly in household books and reminiscences of the period, and vinegar candy is one of the plainest versions of it, needing nothing but sugar, butter and something acid. The acid does real work — it splits sucrose into glucose and fructose during boiling, which is why the candy pulls and holds a satin sheen instead of setting grainy — though nineteenth-century cooks knew this only as a rule of thumb, and cream of tartar, lemon juice and vinegar all served the same purpose in the confectionery chapters of the day. Recipes of this kind sit in the confectionery chapters alongside others that ask the cook to judge a stage of boiled sugar by the cold-water test rather than by a thermometer.