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Yellow Jack
To one quart of yellow corn syrup which has been boiled for thirty minutes add one-half teaspoon bicarbonate of soda which has been rubbed absolutely smooth. Allow to boil, stirring constantly or it may burn, until brittle when tested in cold water. Remove from fire and add one tablespoon lemon juice.
When cool enough to handle, pull until a light, bright yellow. Twist two strands together and cut into desired lengths.
A pulled hard candy of the taffy-pull school, made from nothing but corn syrup, soda and lemon. The whole thing hinges on cooking the syrup far enough — undercooked, it will never set and will not pull.
- "Brittle when tested in cold water"This is the hard-crack stage, 300–310F (150–155C). A drop in ice water should form threads that snap rather than bend. A candy thermometer removes all guesswork, but the water test is reliable if you keep a bowl of genuinely cold water at hand and pull the pan off the heat while testing.
- The two boilingsThe instruction reads oddly: boil the syrup thirty minutes first, stir in the soda, then continue boiling to the brittle stage.
- Rub the soda smoothHalf a teaspoon of bicarbonate must be crushed to a fine powder with the back of a spoon, or lumps of it will sit in the candy as bitter, soapy specks. The soda is there to aerate the syrup very slightly so it pulls light and turns pale rather than staying glassy amber.
- Expect it to climbWhen the soda goes in the syrup foams up sharply. Use a heavy pan at least three times the volume of the syrup — a quart of syrup wants a 4- to 5-quart pan — and stand back.
- Corn syrup then and now"Yellow corn syrup" appears to mean what we would now call dark or golden corn syrup rather than today's colourless light corn syrup, which would pull paler. Golden syrup is probably the closest common substitute in flavour, though it browns faster.
- Lemon juice off the heatThe acid goes in after cooking, as the recipe directs. It is largely flavour, and it balances any soda taste. Stir it in quickly; the mass is still near 300F and the juice will spit.
- Pouring and pullingPour onto a buttered marble slab or a well-buttered rimmed sheet pan and let the edges cool until you can gather them in. Butter your hands generously, and pull with a partner if you can — the candy stiffens as it aerates and gets genuinely hard work near the end. Stop when it lightens to bright yellow and loses its gloss.
- Yield and keepingA quart of syrup makes roughly 2 to 2 1/2 pounds of candy, enough for several dozen twists. Cut with buttered scissors and wrap each piece in waxed paper as soon as it is cool; unwrapped, it goes sticky within hours.
- Choose a dry dayPulled candy draws moisture from the air. In humid weather it will weep and slump no matter how well you cooked it.
Candy-pulling was a set piece of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American social life — an evening's entertainment that produced something to eat, and one of the few kitchen tasks respectable enough to put young men and women's hands in the same bowl. This version belongs to the moment when commercial corn syrup, sold in tins from the early 1900s, put a cheap and reliable boiling sugar in every pantry; the resulting sweets kept the old pull-taffy method but took on the pale gold of the new syrup. The name is generally read as a simple description of that colour, though "yellow jack" was also period slang for yellow fever and for the quarantine flag.