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Hard Candies: Cream
Cream Butterscotch Balls 1 cup white sugar 1/2 cup brown sugar 1/2 cup white corn syrup 1/3 cup butter 1/2 cup heavy cream 1 teaspoon vanilla or lemon extract Put all the ingredients, except the flavoring, in a saucepan, stir until mixed, bring to boiling point, and boil until mixture is just stiff enough to keep its shape, when a little is dropped into cold water. If it can be lifted from the water and remain in a ball when shaped with the fingers, it is done. Remove from fire, add flavoring, pour into a buttered pan, and when cool shape into small balls, and roll in powdered sugar. The candy when removed from the fire may be dropped from the tip of a spoon on an oiled marble slab or tray, into wafers the size of a quarter of a dollar. These should be loosened with a thin-bladed knife before they have time to get hard. Cream Butterscotch with Nuts Follow recipe for making Cream Butterscotch Balls. When candy is removed from fire, add half a cup of walnut or pecan nut meats cut in small pieces, and proceed as in Cream Butterscotch Balls.
Toffee 2 cups light brown sugar 4 teaspoons vinegar or the juice of one lemon 1/2 cup butter 1/2 cup English walnut meats Heat sugar, butter, and vinegar or lemon juice over a moderate fire, stir till the sugar dissolves, then boil without stirring to 270 degrees F., or until syrup forms a hard ball when tried in cold water. Pour carefully around and over the nuts which have been arranged in rows in buttered or oiled pans. When cold, cut in squares, leaving one nut in the center of each square. Horehound Candy 1/2 ounce dried horehound 1 cup water 1 3/4 cups sugar 1/2 cup corn syrup Put water and horehound, which may be procured of a druggist in one-ounce packages, in a saucepan and simmer half an hour. Strain through double cheesecloth; there should be half a cup of liquid. To liquid add sugar and corn syrup, and stir until mixture boils. Wash down crystals from sides of saucepan with a butter brush dipped in cold water, and boil to 295 degrees F., or until it is very brittle when tried in cold water. Remove at once from the fire, and pour into buttered pan one fourth inch thick, or pour between candy bars.
As soon as it cools a little, loosen it from the pan, and mark in small squares. Go over the marks with a knife until candy is cold, then break with the hands.
Pack in air-tight jar, and keep in a cool place, or wrap in wax paper. Burnt Almonds 3 cups sugar 1 cup water 1 cup blanched almonds Put two cups of sugar and half a cup of water in saucepan, stir until dissolved, bring to boiling point, put in the blanched almonds, and stir and boil to 300 degrees F., or until there is a cracking sound, and candy begins to discolor.
Four confections grouped under "hard candies," though only the horehound and the almond coating actually reach the hard-crack stage. A calibrated candy thermometer settles most of the ambiguity in these instructions, but the cold-water tests are still worth knowing when the numbers and the descriptions disagree.
- The cold-water test versus the thermometerIn the toffee the book says "270 degrees F., or until syrup forms a hard ball" — those are not the same thing. Hard ball is roughly 250–265F; 270F is soft crack, which gives the snappier toffee the recipe clearly wants. Follow the number, not the description.
- Butterscotch balls are a firm-ball candyA mass that holds its shape in cold water and can be lifted out as a ball is around 244–248F. Below that it will never firm up enough to roll; much above it and you get a brittle sheet instead of a chewy ball.
- Cream and milk sugars scorchThe butterscotch contains cream, butter and brown sugar, all of which catch on the bottom long before the syrup reaches temperature. Use a heavy-bottomed pan and stir throughout, unlike the toffee, which is boiled undisturbed.
- Washing down the sidesA "butter brush dipped in cold water" is a pastry brush; dissolving stray crystals off the pan walls prevents the whole batch from graining. A tight lid for the first two minutes of boiling does the same job with steam.
- HorehoundMarrubium vulgare, once a standard druggist's item, is now sold as loose dried herb by tea and herb suppliers; the half ounce is best weighed, since its volume varies with how finely the leaf is cut. Simmering must reduce a cup of water to half a cup, so keep the pan uncovered and measure the strained liquid before adding the sugar.
- "Candy bars"These are metal caramel bars laid on a slab to form an adjustable frame, not a modern candy bar. A buttered pan will serve instead, though the depth depends on the size of the pan against the volume of the batch.
- The burnt almonds recipe is incompleteIt lists three cups of sugar and a cup of water but directs you to use only two cups and half a cup, and the text breaks off at 300F with no instruction for the remaining sugar or for separating the nuts. Consult a current praline or sugared-almond method rather than trying to reconstruct the ending.
- Yield and storageHorehound and toffee absorb atmospheric moisture quickly and go sticky; wrap in waxed paper or seal in a jar the day they are made. Butterscotch balls rolled in powdered sugar keep in a tin.
Horehound was the bridge between the confectioner and the apothecary, which is why the book tells you to buy it at a druggist's in one-ounce packages: the bitter mint was a standard cough remedy long before it was a sweet, and the sugar was originally the vehicle rather than the point. Butterscotch and toffee sit at the other end of the same shelf — brown sugar and butter boiled hard, a British confection that American cookbooks took up during the nineteenth century; the origin of the "scotch" is uncertain, one common suggestion being the scoring or "scotching" of the slab into squares rather than any link to Scotland. The thermometer readings — 270F, 295F, 300F given as flat numbers alongside the older cold-water tests — suggest a period in which domestic candy-making was being pulled out of the realm of judgment and into measurement, though printed candy thermometer figures were already in use in the later nineteenth century. Corn syrup appears in two of the four recipes for the same reason it appears throughout American candy books of the period — it had become cheap and widely available, and its glucose interferes with crystallization in a way plain sugar syrup will not.