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Popcorn Balls
3 quarts popped corn
1 cup water
1 cup sugar
¼ teaspoon salt
⅓ cup white corn sirup
1 teaspoon lemon or vanilla
Discard all imperfect kernels of corn. Put the corn into a large pan. Cook sugar, sirup and water to the crack stage, or 270° F. Add flavoring and salt. Pour slowly over the corn, stirring with a spoon so that all kernels will be evenly coated. Shape the corn into balls and lay on waxed paper. Wrap in waxed paper, if desirable.
A straightforward hard-crack popcorn ball; the only real variable is the sugar temperature, and the original helpfully gives it.
- The hinge: 270°FThe book calls 270°F the "crack stage," which is what modern candy charts call soft crack (270–290°F). Take it there on a digital thermometer and the coating sets crisp; stop short and the balls stay tacky and slump within the hour.
- Corn sirup"White corn sirup" is light corn syrup, unchanged and still sold under the same name. Its job is to inhibit crystallization, so do not substitute more granulated sugar for it.
- Three quarts of popped cornThat is 12 cups, which comes from roughly a third of a cup of unpopped kernels. The syrup quantity here coats it lightly rather than drenching it.
- Discarding imperfect kernelsOld-fashioned but worth doing: unpopped and half-popped kernels are hard enough to crack a tooth, and they are far harder to pick out once everything is coated in syrup.
- Warm the cornNot in the original, but holding the popped corn in a 200°F oven while the syrup cooks keeps the coating fluid long enough to toss everything evenly before it sets.
- ShapingThe syrup is around 270°F when poured and will burn bare hands. Wait until it is cool enough to handle, then butter your palms or wear food-safe gloves and press lightly — squeezing hard makes dense, hard balls.
- YieldAbout 10 to 12 balls of roughly two and a half inches. Wrapped in waxed paper they will keep for several days, though humidity turns them sticky faster than anything else.
Popcorn balls belong to the American nineteenth-century sweet tooth, when cheap cane sugar and glucose syrup met a native grain that had been popped over fires long before Europeans arrived. Recipes for them appear in household manuals from the later nineteenth century onward, and they were a fixture of church socials, Fourth of July gatherings and, later, Halloween -- the era before commercially wrapped candy, when homemade treats still went out to the door. The precise thermometer reading here suggests a moment when candy thermometers were becoming available in domestic kitchens and a cookbook could give a number rather than rely only on the older cold-water tests, though the book still names the traditional "crack stage" alongside it.