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Cracker Jack
1 cup of brown sugar, 1 cup of extracted honey. Boil until it hardens when dropped into cold water. Remove from stove and stir in 1/2 teaspoon of soda. Stir in all the pop-corn it will take, spread on greased tins and mark in squares.
A two-ingredient caramel syrup poured over popcorn, closer to a honey-molasses brittle than the peanut-and-molasses coating sold under the Cracker Jack name. The whole recipe hinges on how far you cook the syrup.
- "Hardens when dropped into cold water"Most likely the hard-crack stage, around 300-310F on a candy thermometer, where a drizzle of syrup in cold water sets into brittle threads that snap rather than bend; older books use similar wording for the firmer ball stages too. Stop short of it and the coating stays tacky and chewy; the popcorn will go soft within hours.
- Honey scorches earlyHoney browns at a lower temperature than sugar syrup, so the mixture can taste burnt before it reaches hard crack. Use a heavy pan, moderate heat, and judge by smell as well as by the thermometer.
- Extracted honeySimply honey spun or drained out of the comb rather than pressed or sold in the comb; any ordinary liquid honey. A mild clover or wildflower honey gives a less assertive flavour than a dark buckwheat.
- The soda"soda" here is baking soda (older books also call it saleratus). Off the heat it foams the syrup up, partly by reacting with the acids in the honey but mostly by decomposing in the hot syrup and giving off carbon dioxide; the bubbles lighten the set candy and make it easier to bite. Add it off the heat, stir fast, and expect the mixture to swell -- use a pan several times the depth of the syrup.
- Popcorn quantity"All the pop-corn it will take" is roughly 4 to 5 quarts of popped corn for this amount of syrup, unsalted and freshly popped. Have it warmed in a low oven and waiting in a large greased bowl; the syrup sets in under a minute.
- Marking in squaresPress the mass into greased sheet pans while still hot, protecting your hands with a greased spatula or wetted fingers, and score lines with a buttered knife before it hardens. Once cool it will only break, not cut.
- Yield and keepingOn the order of 1 1/2 lb of candy, enough to fill one half-sheet pan. Store airtight; honey is hygroscopic and humidity will turn the coating sticky within a day or two.
Cracker Jack was a proprietary Chicago confection popularized at the turn of the century, and this book's recipe is for a molasses- or honey-coated popcorn made at home. Popcorn candy was cheap parlour cooking, needing no butter, no nuts and no chocolate, and the baking soda trick — aerating a boiled sugar syrup so it shatters instead of gluing the teeth together — is the same chemistry behind honeycomb toffee and the brittles that filled American candy pages.