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Cream Candy
Put one tablespoonful of butter, two tablespoonfuls of vinegar, one teacupful of water and two pounds of lump sugar into a saucepan and boil the mixture for twenty minutes. Before removing it from the fire add a little extract of vanilla or essence of lemon, and pour it into a flat tin dish, stirring it until quite cold. It is then ready for use.
A plain nineteenth-century pulled-sugar candy, written for cooks who judged sugar by eye and finger rather than by thermometer. The only real difficulty is knowing when to stop the boil.
- Use a thermometer, not the clockTwenty minutes means nothing across different pans and burners. Boil to about 265-270F (hard-ball stage) for a candy that turns opaque and creamy when worked; below about 250F it will stay tacky, and much past 285F it goes hard and brittle.
- A teacupfulIn American books of this period a teacup is reckoned at about 6 fl oz, three-quarters of a modern cup. It is only the dissolving water and most of it boils off, so precision matters less here than the finishing temperature.
- Lump sugarRefined cane sugar sold in cut loaf lumps, the cleanest sugar available at the time. Ordinary granulated white sugar is the same thing; two pounds is roughly 4 1/2 cups.
- What the vinegar doesAcid inverts a portion of the sucrose during boiling, which helps keep the candy from seizing into coarse crystals. Adding much more will leave a sour edge.
- Do not stir while it boilsStir only until the sugar has dissolved, then leave it alone and wash any crystals off the pan sides with a wet brush. Agitating a boiling syrup is the usual cause of grainy candy.
- "Stirring it until quite cold"This is the step that makes it cream candy: working the mass as it cools encourages fine, even crystallisation and turns the clear syrup pale and opaque.
- FlavouringExtract of vanilla or essence of lemon go in at the very end, as the recipe directs, since alcohol-based extracts flash off in hot syrup. Add them just as the bubbling subsides.
- Vessel and yieldUse a heavy saucepan at least four times the volume of the syrup, and an oiled or buttered sheet pan rather than bare tin. Two pounds of sugar gives roughly 2 lb of finished candy.
- StorageWrap pieces individually in waxed paper and keep them airtight. Cream candy draws moisture from the air and can turn sticky quickly if left open.
Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's celebrated maître d'hôtel, published his Cook Book in 1896, and alongside the hotel's restaurant cookery it carries a good deal of straightforward American household confectionery of the sort found in any family receipt book of the day. Cream candy belongs to the large family of nineteenth-century pulled sugar sweets — vinegar candy, molasses taffy, salt water taffy — in which a boiled syrup is cooled and then worked until it whitens and becomes short rather than chewy. The acid here does the job that glucose syrup or cream of tartar does in later recipes: it keeps the sugar from crystallising coarsely in the pan so that the cook, and not the kettle, decides when crystals form. Candy pulls were a common parlour and church-social entertainment in America through the second half of the century, which is one reason recipes this brief could assume the reader already knew what pulling looked like.