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Chocolate Caramels
2 Cups Honey 1 Teaspoon Cinnamon or Vanilla Pound Cocoa 3/4 Pound Pecan Nuts 2 Pounds Sweet Almonds Cut the nuts fine and boil them with other ingredients until thick (260° F.).
Cool and roll out. Cut in squares and dry in oven.
This is a caramel in name only — there is no cream, butter or refined sugar in it. What you are actually making is a stiff honey-and-cocoa nut paste, closer to a dense torrone or a Middle Eastern nut candy than to a chewy dairy caramel.
- The cocoa quantity is brokenThe line reads "Pound Cocoa" with no number in front of it, and the original very likely said ½ or ¼ pound. A full pound of cocoa against two cups of honey would be unworkably dry, so treat the amount as genuinely unknown rather than guessing from the page.
- 260°F is hard-ball stageThat temperature is the hinge of the whole recipe. Below it the squares will slump and weep; much above it and the honey scorches, since honey browns and turns bitter well before sugar syrup does. Use a digital probe and pull the pan the moment it reads.
- Honey foamsHoney boils up two or three times its volume and climbs fast, and the nuts make it spit. Use a heavy pan at least three times the depth you think you need, and stir with a long-handled spoon.
- The nut ratioNearly three pounds of nuts to two cups of honey means this is barely pourable — expect to press it into a sheet rather than pour it. Line a rimmed tray with parchment and flatten it under a second sheet before rolling.
- Sweet almondsSimply ordinary almonds. The distinction mattered when bitter almonds were still sold for flavouring; any blanched almond from a supermarket is what is meant here. Toasting them first improves the finished sweet considerably.
- "Cut the nuts fine"Chop by hand or pulse briefly. A food processor run too long turns almonds to butter, and the oil released will keep the mass from setting cleanly.
- "Dry in oven"No temperature is given. The intent appears to be firming the surface rather than baking, so the lowest setting your oven offers (very roughly 170–200°F) with the door propped, for an hour or so, is a reasonable modern reading. Many modern ovens will not go low enough; overnight in a warm dry room does much the same job.
- YieldImpossible to state exactly while the cocoa quantity is missing; the nuts and honey alone come to something over four pounds before boiling losses, so expect a large batch of small squares. Store between layers of parchment in a tin; humidity will make the cut faces tacky.
Bride's cook books were a genre unto themselves in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — compilations sold or given to new householders, usually assembled from contributed recipes and heavy on preserves, cakes and confections. "Caramel" in such books was often applied loosely to boiled sugar sweets cut into squares, and this one has no dairy at all; a boiled honey-and-nut paste of this kind resembles the older Mediterranean and Near Eastern family of confections that includes torrone and halva, though no direct line of descent can be shown from the page itself. The missing quantity before "Pound Cocoa" is most likely a printing or transcription slip of the sort such volumes are prone to.