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Caramels and Nougatines: Vanilla
Except in very cold weather, caramels and nougatines should be wrapped in wax paper as soon as cut, or dipped in melted coating chocolate or fondant. Vanilla Caramels 1 cup sugar 1/2 cup corn syrup 1 1/2 cups cream 1 teaspoon vanilla Put sugar, corn syrup, and half a cup of cream in saucepan, stir until sugar is dissolved, bring to boiling point, and boil until mixture will form a soft ball when tried in cold water. Stir gently and constantly to prevent burning, making the spoon reach all parts of the bottom of the saucepan. Do not beat, as beating may cause the candy to become granular. As soon as candy forms a soft ball add another half cup of cream. Boil until it again forms a soft ball in cold water, add remaining cream, and boil until candy will form a decidedly firm ball when tried in cold water. The caramels when cold will be of the same consistency as this firm ball. Pour caramel into a buttered pan seven inches square. When cool cut in squares, and wrap in wax paper. If caramel should get sugary, return it to kettle, add more cream, and boil again. If all the cream is added at once, caramels may be made in a shorter time, but they will not be as rich and creamy.
A straightforward cooked-cream caramel whose only real trick is the staged addition of cream. The recipe leans entirely on cold-water testing; a thermometer makes it repeatable.
- The hinge: add the cream in three partsEach addition drops the temperature and lets the sugars and milk solids cook longer without scorching, which is where the deep caramel flavor comes from. The note at the end is the recipe's own claim: dumping all 1 1/2 cups in at the start is faster but, by the author's account, gives a less rich and creamy candy.
- Temperatures for the ball stagesThe recipe gives no temperatures, only cold-water tests; on the usual scale soft ball is 235-240F and a firm ball 245-250F, with about 248F giving a caramel that holds its shape at room temperature but still chews. Much above 250F you move into hard-ball territory and the result turns progressively tougher.
- Cream"Cream" here is unspecified, and period cream varied; assume something in the range of modern heavy cream rather than a thin one. Half-and-half or light cream will not set as firmly and scorches more readily. Warming the cream before each addition keeps the boil from stalling.
- Do not beatThe instruction matters. Agitating a supersaturated sugar syrup seeds crystals and turns the batch grainy. Stir slowly and steadily, keeping the spoon moving across the whole bottom of the pan, and use a heavy-bottomed saucepan of at least 3 quarts — the mixture foams high when cream goes in.
- Coating chocolateThis means tempered couverture or a compound coating, not chocolate chips. If you skip dipping, wax paper still works; parchment or cellophane candy wrappers do the same job.
- Pan and yieldThe recipe specifies a buttered pan seven inches square; the slab will be fairly thin, well under 3/4 inch once the mixture has boiled down. Buttered foil or parchment lifted out whole makes cutting far easier than greasing alone. Cut into 3/4-inch squares for roughly 80 pieces; a lightly oiled knife prevents dragging.
- If it turns sugaryThe salvage direction is sound — returning the mass to the pan with more cream redissolves the crystals. Add enough liquid to loosen it fully, dissolve over low heat before boiling again, and re-cook to the firm-ball stage.
Caramels of this type belong to the American candy boom of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when cheap glucose (corn) syrup and reliable dairy made chewy cream candies a commercial staple in a way they had not been before. Corn syrup is what keeps this recipe from crystallizing: it interferes with sucrose forming an orderly crystal lattice, which is one reason it turns up in many fudge and nougat formulas of the era, though plenty of period fudge recipes use none at all. "Nougatine" in a book like this is often taken to mean the same cooked caramel with nuts stirred through rather than the French caramelized-almond brittle of the same name, but that is an inference: the page under review gives no nougatine recipe. The insistence on wrapping each piece in wax paper may well have to do with keeping caramels from slumping and picking up moisture in a warm room, though the text itself says nothing of the sort beyond excepting very cold weather from the rest.