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Molasses Taffy
2 cups molasses
⅛ teaspoon soda
1 cup granulated sugar
4 tablespoons butter
¾ cup water
½ teaspoon vanilla
Cook the molasses, sugar and water slowly to the hard-ball stage, or 260° F., stirring during the latter part of the cooking to prevent its burning. Remove from the fire, add the butter, soda and vanilla and stir enough to mix. Pour into a greased pan and, when cool enough to handle, pull it into a long rope and cut with scissors into small pieces.
A conventional pulled taffy, and the sugar work is sound enough to follow as written. A few points of translation and technique will save the batch.
- The thermometer is the recipeThe thermometer pins down the stage name -- 260°F falls within what older books called the hard-ball stage (roughly 250-266°F), so the figure simply fixes a point in a broad range. Use a calibrated candy thermometer and pull the pan at 260°F.
- MolassesUse unsulphured light or dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and low in the sugars that make taffy chewy. Sorghum syrup works, and in some inland American kitchens "molasses" could mean sorghum.
- The sodaAn eighth of a teaspoon looks trivial but it neutralises some of the acid in the molasses and releases a little gas; the pale, tender character of pulled candy, though, comes mostly from the air worked in during pulling. Stir it in briefly and no more, since overworking hot syrup encourages graining.
- "Remove from the fire"Take the pan off the heat before adding the butter and soda; the mixture may foam up a little. Use a roomy pan.
- Cooling before pullingPour it out shallow and let it sit until you can press the surface without it flowing back. Fold the cooler edges toward the centre with a buttered scraper so it cools evenly.
- PullingButter your hands rather than flouring them. Pull and fold for 10 to 15 minutes, until the rope lightens from brown to tan and turns opaque and stiff; that colour change is the signal to stop.
- HumidityBoiled sugar draws water from the air. On a damp day the finished pieces will go sticky within hours.
- Yield and storageWrap each piece in waxed paper twists and keep in a tin; unwrapped, they weld into a single mass.
Molasses taffy belongs to the era when molasses was a cheap sweetener in American households and refined white sugar the more expensive one. Pulling candy was social as much as culinary: the taffy pull, in which cooled syrup was worked in pairs by buttered hands, was a standard rural and small-town winter entertainment through the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth.