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Molasses Candy
Two cups molasses; one cup white sugar; butter half the size of an egg; two teaspoons vinegar; boil until candy hardens in cold water.
A four-ingredient pulled taffy that depends entirely on reading the sugar stage correctly. Everything else is timing and hand speed once it comes off the heat.
- The hinge: hard-crack stageThe hinge: the cold-water test -- "Hardens in cold water" means a drizzle of syrup dropped into cold water sets firm rather than staying soft. The recipe does not name a stage: a fully brittle snap corresponds to about 300-310F, while a batch meant to be pulled is usually taken lower, in the hard-ball to soft-crack range of roughly 255-275F. Too low and the candy stays tacky and slumps; taken very high, molasses is apt to scorch and turn bitter.
- Butter half the size of an eggRoughly 2 tablespoons, or 1 oz. The butter helps keep the boiling syrup from foaming over and makes the finished candy easier to handle.
- The vinegar is functionalTwo teaspoons of acid inverts some of the sucrose during boiling, which discourages graining and keeps the candy chewy rather than sandy. Do not leave it out; cider or white vinegar both work and neither is tasteable in the result.
- Which molassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses. Blackstrap is far more bitter and mineral than what a 1911 kitchen meant by molasses, and it will dominate the cup of sugar.
- Pan and volumeUse a heavy pan holding at least three quarts. Molasses syrup climbs dramatically as it approaches 300F, and a two-quart pan will boil over.
- Do not stir once it boilsStir only until the sugar dissolves. Agitation after that seeds crystals; wash any grains off the pan sides with a wet brush instead.
- PullingThe recipe stops at the boil and gives no further direction. If it is handled as a pulled taffy, pour onto a buttered marble slab or heavy sheet pan, fold the edges in as they firm, and pull with buttered hands until the colour lightens to tan and the ropes hold their shape, then twist, cut with scissors, and wrap the pieces.
- Yield and storageSomething in the region of a pound and a half of candy. Wrap each piece in waxed paper and keep it airtight; molasses taffy pulls moisture from humid air and will weld into a single mass otherwise.
Molasses candy of this kind was the centrepiece of the American taffy pull, a nineteenth-century parlour amusement in which young people buttered their hands and stretched the cooled syrup between them until it lightened. The economics explain its reach: molasses was the cheap sweetener of the eastern seaboard well into the 1800s, a byproduct of sugar refining that cost a fraction of loaf sugar, and the cup of white sugar here may well have been added mainly for body and a cleaner set. Butterick, whose cook book grew out of a pattern and fashion publishing house aimed squarely at the home sewer and housekeeper, includes candies alongside preserves and cakes as things a household made rather than bought by 1911, but making it at home still counted as entertainment.