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BRITTLE candies like butterscotch, barley sugar, peppermint sticks, brittles and nougats, are cooked to 290 degrees F. or up to 330 degrees F. They should be thin and very brittle when finished.
Candies boiled to a high temperature and pulled must be handled with canvas gloves, in front of a warm oven or batch warmer. Much experience is required to successfully manipulate the syrup used in making Christmas and stick candies, and it will hardly pay the home candy maker to attempt them. Barley Sugar Drops 2 cups sugar 1 cup water Color paste 1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar Flavoring extract Put sugar and water in saucepan, stir until dissolved, add coloring if desired, cover, and boil three minutes. Remove cover, add cream of tartar, and boil to 300 degrees F., or until it just begins to change color. Add few drops of flavoring--peppermint, lemon, or orange extract--and drop at once on tin sheet from tip of spoon, in portions the size of a silver half dollar. Store in a tight glass jar.
Barley Sugar Sticks Prepare candy as directed in Barley Sugar Drops. Pour on tin sheet in strips four inches long and three fourths inch wide. Take up one at a time, twist, and place in covered glass jars.
This is a straightforward boiled-sugar candy, and the only real variable is temperature. A digital or candy thermometer removes all the guesswork the original leaves in.
- The hinge: stop at 300FBarley sugar drops set hard and clear at 300F (hard-crack stage). Past about 320F the syrup begins to caramelize and both color and flavor turn; the recipe's "just begins to change color" is already the outer edge of the window.
- Cover the pan, then uncoverBoiling three minutes with the lid on lets condensing steam wash sugar crystals off the pan walls, which is what keeps the finished candy glassy rather than grainy. A wet pastry brush around the rim does the same job.
- Cream of tartarAbout 1/4 teaspoon inverts a portion of the sucrose so the syrup resists recrystallizing. Corn syrup does the same thing by a different route, but do not simply swap it in here at volume, as it changes the final set.
- "Tin sheet"Read as a heavy baking sheet, lightly oiled. A silicone baking mat works well, and marble is the traditional surface if you have it. Parchment is less reliable for freeform drops, since it can buckle and let the syrup pool unevenly.
- Size of the dropsA silver half dollar is about 1 1/4 inches across, roughly a rounded teaspoon of syrup. Work fast, as the batch stiffens in the pan within a couple of minutes; brief gentle rewarming will loosen it, but any further time on the heat pushes the temperature up and starts the color changing.
- Flavoring off the heatAdd extracts after the pan leaves the burner, standing back, since alcohol-based flavorings sputter violently in 300F sugar. Oil-based candy flavorings hold up better than supermarket extracts at this temperature.
- Color pasteGel or paste colors, added early with the water, keep the syrup from being thinned. Liquid food coloring works but should go in with the water, not at the end.
- Humidity and storageHard candy pulls moisture from the air and goes tacky within hours in a damp kitchen. The tight glass jar is not optional advice; dust the pieces with a little cornstarch or wrap them individually if they must be kept more than a few days.
- YieldTwo cups of sugar weighs roughly 14 ounces and almost all of it stays in the candy, so expect close to a pound of finished sweets. The number of drops, and of four-inch sticks, will depend entirely on how large you pour them.
- On the twisted sticksThe book's warning stands. Twisting requires handling near-molten sugar, and the canvas gloves and warm oven exist to keep the batch pliable while your hands survive. Heavy cotton or leather work gloves under nitrile are the modern equivalent; bare hands will burn.
Barley sugar is a long-established European hard candy, generally traced to French confectioners who boiled sugar with a barley-water decoction, which gave the sweet both its name and a faintly cloudy amber color. By the time this book was written the barley had long since dropped out and the name attached to any clear boiled-sugar drop or twist, flavored with lemon, orange, or peppermint. The introductory note is worth reading as a document of its moment: American candy manufacture is said to have industrialized around steam-jacketed kettles and batch warmers, and the author is frank in telling the home cook that pulled Christmas candy and striped sticks belong to people with that equipment. What the household is left with is the part that a thermometer made reliable, which is the boiled drop.