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Vinegar Candy
One pound of white sugar; one wine glass vinegar; one tumbler of water and a teaspoon of vanilla. Boil half an hour and pull until very white.
This is a pulled taffy, and the half-hour boil is the only vague instruction in it. Work by temperature and the rest falls into place.
- Wine glass and tumblerA wine glass in American cookbooks of this era is about 2 fl oz (1/4 cup); a tumbler is about 8 fl oz (1 cup). So: 1 lb sugar (roughly 2 1/4 cups), 1/4 cup vinegar, 1 cup water.
- Ignore the clock, use a thermometer"Boil half an hour" describes a slow coal range, not a modern burner. Cook uncovered without stirring to 265-270F, that is the top of hard ball running into the start of soft crack; on a strong gas flame it will get there appreciably sooner than half an hour.
- Vanilla goes in lastAdded at the start it simply boils away. Stir it in off the heat once the syrup has stopped bubbling, along with a spoonful of butter if you want a softer pull.
- Why the vinegar is thereAcid inverts part of the sucrose, which keeps the finished candy from turning grainy while it is worked. It also leaves a faint sourness behind the vanilla, which is the point of the sweet.
- Cooling before pullingPour onto a buttered marble slab or a heavy buttered baking sheet and let it firm at the edges. Fold the edges in with a scraper until the mass is cool enough to hold in buttered hands.
- "Pull until very white"The whitening is chiefly air worked into the candy, scattering the light. Ten to fifteen minutes of stretching and folding takes it from amber to opaque pearl; stop when it becomes stiff and dull or it will crack rather than stretch.
- Finishing and storingPull the rope to about half an inch thick, cut with buttered scissors, and wrap each piece in waxed paper. Taffy pulls moisture from the air and will go sticky within a day in a humid kitchen.
- YieldAbout 1 lb of candy, some 40 to 50 small pieces. Avoid attempting it on a damp day.
Vinegar candy belongs to the era of the taffy pull, a fixture of American parlor and church socials through the second half of the nineteenth century, when a batch of hot sugar and a room of people willing to grease their hands made an evening's entertainment. Cheap white sugar, cider vinegar and water were within reach of almost any household, and versions of this recipe seem to have circulated widely, usually with no more instruction than a boiling time and the direction to pull until white. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, issued its cook book to the same audience of home-managing subscribers, and a candy chapter of this kind is aimed squarely at family confectionery rather than at the professional sugar boiler, who would presumably have wanted something more precise than "half an hour" as a stage.