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Honey Popcorn Balls
Take 1 pint extracted honey; put it into an iron frying pan and boil until very thick; then stir in freshly popped corn and when cool mold into balls. These will especially delight the children.
— Mrs. Aiken's Honey Apple-Butter
1 gallon good cooking apples, 1 quart of honey, 1 quart honey-vinegar; 1 heaping teaspoonful ground cinnamon. Cook several hours, stirring often to prevent burning. If the vinegar is very strong, use part water.
Two honey recipes run together on one page: a popcorn ball and, appended without a break, Mrs. Aiken's apple butter. Both are workable, but the honey syrup is the part that needs judgment.
- The hinge: boil the honey to hard-ball stageThe hinge: boil the honey thick enough to set. "Boil until very thick" gives no temperature; in practice popcorn-ball syrup is taken to about hard-ball stage, roughly 250-265F on a candy thermometer. Under that the balls slump and stay tacky; much over it and the honey scorches, since honey browns and turns bitter at a lower temperature than plain sugar syrup.
- Use a heavy pan, not necessarily ironThe recipe specifies an iron frying pan but gives no reason. Any heavy-bottomed saucepan with high sides works better — a pint of honey foams up considerably as it boils.
- Quantities: honey to cornThe recipe gives no quantity of corn. A pint of honey is a great deal of syrup — enough to coat roughly 4 to 5 quarts of popped corn, which is about half a cup of unpopped kernels. Have the corn popped, salted and warmed in a low oven before the syrup is ready; cold corn chills the honey on contact.
- MoldingButter your hands and work fast — the mass sets as it cools, and "when cool" here means warm enough to shape, not room temperature. Expect about a dozen balls the size of a tennis ball.
- Honey-vinegarThe apple butter calls for vinegar fermented from honey and water, a homestead product of the period. Cider vinegar is the natural substitute; the recipe's own note about diluting with water if it is "very strong" applies, as most commercial vinegar is 5 percent acidity.
- A gallon of applesAbout 5 to 6 lb whole, or roughly 4 lb once peeled and cored. Cook it over low heat, stirring often as directed; several hours is plausible for a batch this size, and it is done when a spoonful mounds without weeping liquid.
- Storage of the apple butterThe original assumes crocks in a cool cellar. Refrigerate it and use within a couple of weeks, or freeze it. Do not attempt to seal jars for the pantry on the strength of these instructions — no processing time or method is given.
Popcorn balls belong to the American nineteenth century, when popping corn was cheap, homegrown and a fixture of children's parties and Hallowe'en; molasses was the usual binder, with sugar syrup a close second. Honey appears here because this section of the book is devoted to it — beekeeping was a common household sideline, and honey chapters aimed at families with hives who needed to use up a crop were not unusual. Apple butter, the second recipe, is the older tradition of the two: a long, slow reduction of apples in cider that concentrated the fruit enough to keep through winter without sealing, and which in Pennsylvania and the Midwest was often made outdoors in a copper kettle at a communal stirring party. That both recipes lean on honey rather than sugar tells you something about whose kitchen this book imagined — one where the sweetener came from the yard.