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Chocolate Caramels (Pint of sugar pint)
1 pint of sugar, 1 pint of extracted ohney, ¼ pound of grated chocolate, 1/2 cup of sweet cream. Try often while it is boiling by dropping a small portion in cold water.
When it will form a soft ball, pour about ¼ inch thick on greased tins.
A short caramel formula that assumes you know how to read a cold-water test. The printed text carries obvious typesetting slips, so start by sorting out what the quantities actually are.
- The typos"Extracted ohney" is extracted honey, meaning honey spun out of the comb rather than comb honey. "14 pound" and "14 inch" are broken fractions for 1/4 pound and 1/4 inch.
- Sugar and honey by volumeSugar was often measured by the pint in this period rather than weighed: a pint of granulated sugar is 2 cups, or roughly 14 oz. A pint of honey is denser, around 24 oz. That is a high proportion of honey to sugar, which is likely to give a softer, darker caramel that stays tacky.
- Grated chocolateA quarter pound is 4 oz. This would be unsweetened cake chocolate, grated so it would disperse into the syrup. Modern unsweetened baking chocolate, chopped fine, is the nearest equivalent; using semisweet will push an already very sweet batch further.
- Sweet cream"Sweet" only distinguishes it from soured or cultured cream. Heavy cream is correct.
- The soft-ball test is the whole recipeThat cold-water drop is the only doneness instruction given, and it corresponds to 235-240F on a thermometer. Honey scorches more readily than sugar syrup, so keep the heat moderate and stir the bottom, and pull the pan the moment the test ball holds its shape between your fingers.
- Pan and cuttingGreased tins here are presumably shallow rimmed pans. Pour to 1/4 inch, let it firm until it holds a mark, then score into squares with an oiled knife before it sets hard; cutting cold caramel of this composition tends to crack it.
- Yield and keepingExpect roughly 2 lb of finished candy. Honey caramels draw moisture from the air, so wrap each piece in waxed paper rather than stacking them loose.
Caramels of this type belong to the wave of American home candy-making that followed cheap refined sugar and cheap eating chocolate in the second half of the nineteenth century; by the 1890s cookbooks routinely gave a page or two of caramels, fudge and taffy alongside preserves. Honey as the bulk sweetener rather than a flavouring suggests a household with ready access to it, and "extracted" honey was a relatively new commercial category, the centrifugal honey extractor having spread among American beekeepers from the 1870s onward. The telegraphic instructions and uncorrected typesetting are typical of compilations assembled from contributed receipts, which assume the reader has watched someone else do it.