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American Candy
Pour one pint of water and one-fourth pint of vinegar over six pounds of sugar and leave it until fully dissolved. Place a sugar-pan over the fire and let the contents boil fast till thick enough to put into ropes. Mix in them one-fourth pound of butter and boil hard for two minutes; stir in one teaspoonful of dry soda and remove the candy from the fire. Allow it to stand until the effervescence ceases and then stir in a flavoring of vanilla. Turn it out onto greased dishes, and with the tips of the fingers pull it until it is white.
This is a pulled white taffy scaled for a hotel confectionery department: six pounds of sugar will yield roughly five to six pounds of finished candy. Everything hinges on the cooked temperature, so use a thermometer rather than trusting the eye.
- Scale it downQuarter the recipe for a home batch: 1 1/2 lb (about 3 1/3 cups) sugar, 1/2 cup water, 2 tablespoons vinegar, 1 tablespoon butter, 1/4 teaspoon baking soda. Pulling six pounds of taffy by hand is a two-person job and the mass cools faster than you can work it.
- "Thick enough to put into ropes"Most likely the hard-ball to soft-crack range, in the region of 255-270F. Undercooked, the candy will sag and stay sticky; cooked much past the top of the soft-crack range it tends to turn brittle and resist pulling. The book gives no temperature, so a thermometer is a modern substitute for the confectioner's eye.
- Sugar-panAn unlined copper or heavy untinned pan, deep and straight-sided. Any heavy saucepan with at least four times the volume of the syrup works; the mixture climbs sharply when the soda goes in.
- Dry sodaPlain baking soda (bicarbonate of soda), added dry rather than dissolved. It neutralises some of the vinegar and throws off carbon dioxide, which helps lighten and aerate the mass; the opaque white itself comes chiefly from the air folded in during pulling.
- Why the vinegarThe acid inverts part of the sucrose during the long boil, which prevents the finished candy from going grainy. It cooks off in flavour terms; do not substitute lemon juice by volume without expecting a different result.
- Wait for the effervescenceAdding vanilla while the mass is still foaming drives most of it off in the steam. Let the bubbling subside for a minute or two, then stir it in.
- Greased dishes, greased handsButter the slab or sheet pans generously, and butter your hands as well. Fold the edges toward the centre while the mass is still too hot to touch, and begin pulling once it has cooled enough to handle (roughly 130-140F), working it until it lightens and stiffens, usually ten to fifteen minutes.
- Finishing and storingCut the pulled ropes with buttered scissors and wrap each piece in waxed paper. Unwrapped taffy takes up moisture from the air and, in humid conditions, can stick together into a single mass quite quickly.
Oscar Tschirky's book of 1896 gathered the working formulas of the Waldorf's kitchens, and candy was among them. Calling plain pulled sugar taffy "American Candy" reflects how thoroughly the taffy pull had become a domestic American institution by the 1890s, a winter-evening entertainment in which the cooling sugar was passed between two pairs of buttered hands until it whitened. The whitening is not a dye or an additive but optics: pulling folds air into the sugar in fine threads that scatter light, the same principle behind the pale ribbons on a candy cane. Vinegar-and-soda taffies of this kind appear throughout nineteenth-century American cookbooks alongside molasses versions.