Home › Confections › Popcorn
Popcorn
A Splendid substitute for sugar sweets.
Pop the dried corn in a regular popper or a covered iron frying pan, shaking vigorously and taking care not to let it burn. A cup of dried corn will make three quarts when popped. It is good mixed with a little salt or melted butter and salt.
To make a sweet of it, combine with syrup. Boil together one cup corn syrup and one tablespoon vinegar until a few drops harden in water. Pour over the popped corn while the syrup is hot.
This amount of syrup will cover three quarts of popped corn. As soon as the mass is cool enough to handle, grease the hands well and form into balls.
A stovetop popcorn ball, sweetened with corn syrup rather than sugar. Two things need attention: the pan work, and knowing when the syrup is done.
- "Dried corn" means popping cornThis is not dried sweet corn or hominy corn but the hard-hulled popping variety, sold today as yellow or white popcorn kernels. Ordinary field or sweet corn will not pop.
- Add fat to the panThe recipe does not say whether to pop dry or with fat; it only warns against letting the corn burn. Two to three tablespoons of a neutral oil in a heavy pan over medium-high heat, with the pan kept moving, makes scorching less likely; a hot-air popper works too.
- The syrup stage is the hinge"A few drops harden in water" points to the hard-ball to soft-crack range, roughly 250-290F on a thermometer. Under-cooked syrup gives balls that sag and weep; a candy thermometer removes the guesswork.
- Watch it closelyOne cup of corn syrup with a tablespoon of vinegar contains almost no added water, so it reaches temperature quickly and can scorch. Use a heavy saucepan and do not stir once it boils.
- Why the vinegarAcid is a traditional guard against graininess in boiled candy, though corn syrup already resists crystallizing on its own. At this quantity little sourness is likely to be noticeable in the finished balls.
- Pour, then work fastHave the popped corn in a large warmed bowl with the unpopped kernels shaken out, pour the syrup around the edges rather than in one puddle, and toss with a greased spoon. The window for shaping balls is short, perhaps a minute or two.
- Greasing the handsButter or oil on the palms is what keeps the mass from welding to your skin. The syrup is poured at candy temperature, so let the mass cool until it is genuinely handleable before shaping, as the recipe directs.
- Yield and keepingOne cup of kernels gives about three quarts popped, as the recipe states, and one cup of syrup is enough to coat that amount. Wrap each ball in waxed paper once fully cold; they soften in humid weather.
Popcorn balls belong to the long American tradition of turning cheap corn into a confection, and the framing here as "a splendid substitute for sugar sweets" suggests a context in which sugar was expensive or in short supply, though the phrase alone does not date the book or establish rationing. Corn syrup was an obvious replacement: commercially refined glucose syrup became widely available in American kitchens in the early twentieth century and was promoted as a substitute for cane sugar in candy, where its resistance to crystallizing is a genuine advantage. Confections like this needed no special equipment beyond a frying pan with a lid and produced something festive from a cup of dried corn. The vinegar is old candy-maker's insurance, appearing in taffy and pull-candy recipes for the same reason it appears here.