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Honey-Carmels
1 cup extracted honey of best flavor, 1 cup granulated sugar, 3 tablespoonfuls sweet cream or milk. Boil to "soft crack," or until it hardens when dropped into cold water, but not too brittle-just so it will form into a soft ball when taken in the fingers. Pour into a greased dish, stirring in a teaspoonful extract of vanilla just before taking off. Let it be ½ or ¾ inch deep in the dish; and as it cools, cut in squares and wrap each square in paraffine paper, such as grocers wrap butter in. To make chocolate-caramels, add to the foregoing 1 tablespoonful melted chocolate, just before taking off the stove, stirring it in well. For chocolate-caramels it is not so important that the honey be of best quality. - C. C. Miller.
A two-ingredient honey candy with a cream enrichment, from an era when candy stages were judged by hand in a cup of cold water. The one thing to settle before you start is which stage the recipe actually wants.
- Soft crack or soft ball — pick soft ballThe text names "soft crack" but then describes a soft ball, which are two different stages. Follow the description: around 235-245F on a thermometer gives a chewy caramel that holds a square. True soft-crack (about 270-290F) would set hard enough to crack the teeth.
- Honey scorches before sugar doesThe fructose in honey browns at a lower temperature than sucrose. Use a heavy-bottomed pan, keep the heat moderate rather than high, and stir at the end; a scorched batch tastes bitter and cannot be rescued.
- "Extracted honey"Honey spun out of the comb in an extractor, i.e. ordinary liquid honey, as opposed to comb honey or the cut-comb sold in the same period. Any clear supermarket honey qualifies. The instruction to use the best flavour is real advice: this candy tastes of little else.
- The depthThe printed page gives the depth as ½ or ¾ inch, which is what the text now reads. At that thickness the caramels cut cleanly into squares once cooled.
- Melted chocolateIn this period this meant unsweetened baking chocolate, melted, not chips or couverture. One tablespoon is about half an ounce. Modern chips carry added sugar and emulsifiers and will loosen the set slightly.
- Paraffine paperWaxed paper. Cut it into squares a little larger than the caramels; the candy is hygroscopic from the honey and will weep and stick together if left bare.
- Cut while warmScore the slab while it is still warm enough to yield but firm enough to hold a line, then break along the scores once cold. A fully set honey caramel resists a knife and tears rather than cuts.
- YieldAbout one pound of candy, roughly 36 pieces at one inch. It keeps a week or two wrapped and airtight; longer than that and it softens.
The attribution is worth noticing: C. C. Miller was Dr. Charles C. Miller of Marengo, Illinois, one of the best-known American beekeepers of the late nineteenth century and author of Fifty Years Among the Bees. Honey recipes circulated heavily through the bee journals of the period, where producers had a direct commercial interest in persuading households to cook with honey rather than treat it only as a table sweetener — hence the practical note that inferior honey will do once chocolate covers the flavour. That a bride's cookbook groups honey with ices and gelatines says something about how such books were organised: not by course but by the housekeeper's stores, with a section for whatever came out of the hive alongside the cold sweets. Boiled honey candies of this kind are far older than the recipe, which stretches the costlier honey with a cup of cheap refined granulated sugar.