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Maple Sugar Candy
Break into pieces one pound of soft maple sugar and put in a saucepan with three-fourths cup of cream and one-fourth cup of boiling water. Boil until it forms a soft ball when tested in cold water. Remove from fire, beat until creamy, add a cup of broken nut meats and pour into buttered tins.
This is maple fudge under an older name, and it lives or dies on the sugar thermometer. Everything else is straightforward.
- Soft ball means 236-240FSoft ball means about 234-240F -- cook to around 238F on a candy thermometer and confirm with the cold-water test. Much below that and the candy stays too soft to cut; taken well past the low 240s it turns hard and crumbly.
- Soft maple sugarNineteenth-century "soft" maple sugar was moist, freshly made cake sugar that broke up easily. Modern hard maple sugar cakes or granulated maple sugar work, but grate or chop them fine and expect to stir longer to dissolve; a tablespoon or two of extra water helps.
- CreamUse heavy or whipping cream. The recipe's three-fourths cup plus a quarter cup of water is enough liquid that scorching is unlikely early on, but the mixture thickens fast at the end, so use a heavy-bottomed pan and stir once the temperature passes 220F.
- When to beat"Remove from fire, beat until creamy" gives a coarse grain if done immediately. Letting the syrup cool undisturbed to about 110F before beating produces a smoother, finer-crystalled candy. Beat with a wooden spoon until it loses its gloss and stiffens.
- Nut meatsButternuts, hickory nuts and black walnuts were the period choices; English walnuts or pecans are the practical modern equivalents. Toast them first and add them at the very end, when the candy is already thickening, or they sink.
- Buttered tinsA buttered 8-inch square pan is about right. Pour quickly, smooth the top, and score into squares while still warm; once fully set it will break rather than cut cleanly.
- YieldRoughly a pound and a half of candy, cut into small squares. Best eaten within a week or so from an airtight tin, after which it dries out.
Maple sugar, not maple syrup, was the standard maple product for most of the nineteenth century: sugar stored and shipped without spoiling, while syrup needed sealed containers and reliable canning. Farm families in the northern states and Canada boiled sap down to cakes and tubs of soft sugar, and a household with its own sugarbush treated it as an everyday sweetener rather than a luxury. By the early twentieth century canned syrup was increasingly taking the place of sugar in the general market, and a recipe like this one, calling for soft sugar broken into pieces, reads as a holdover from a more self-sufficient kitchen. The candy itself is a plain fudge: boil sugar with cream to the soft-ball stage, beat it to force fine crystals, and add nuts. Butternut and hickory were common partners for maple in the sugar-making regions, both gathered rather than bought.