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Raspberry Caramels
Put six pounds of sugar and one-half gallon of cream into a sugar-boiler, stir well, and add four pounds of glucose, boil for about fifteen minutes, stirring all the time. Add one and one-half pounds of butter, and boil it to the crack. Add two tablespoonfuls of raspberry extract, stir well, turn the mixture out onto a well-oiled plate, and allow it to cool. Mark it in the desired shapes, break it when cold, put the pieces away into bottles or boxes, and let them remain in a dry place until required for use.
A confectioner's batch, sized for a hotel candy bench: roughly twelve pounds of finished sweets. Everything about it scales down cleanly, but the temperature language does not translate directly.
- "Boil it to the crack"This is the hinge. The crack stage is about 290-300F on a candy thermometer, well past the firm-ball stage (245-250F) used for chewy modern caramels. That is why the recipe says to break the slab rather than cut it: these are meant to snap, closer to a cream toffee than to a soft caramel.
- Scaling downDivide by six for a manageable home batch: 1 lb sugar, about 1 1/3 cups cream, 10 1/2 oz glucose or corn syrup, 4 oz butter, and 1 teaspoon raspberry extract. Use a pan holding at least four times the volume of the cold mixture, since cream and sugar foam violently near the crack stage.
- GlucoseCommercial confectioner's glucose syrup, sold to the trade in tins. Light corn syrup is the everyday substitute and behaves the same way here, interfering with sucrose crystallisation so the candy sets glassy rather than grainy.
- Sugar-boilerAn unlined copper pot made for sugar work. A heavy stainless or copper saucepan with a thick base is the equivalent; thin aluminium will scorch the milk solids long before the syrup reaches temperature.
- Stirring is not optionalWith this much cream in the pan, the dairy proteins and sugars are browning the whole time. Stir constantly with a heatproof spatula, reaching the corners, or the batch will taste burnt rather than caramelised.
- Butter goes in lateThe butter goes in after the first boiling, as directed, which keeps the milk solids in the butter from spending as long over direct heat.
- The oiled plateA marble slab is traditional; a rimmed baking sheet lined with oiled parchment or a silicone mat works. Score the surface into squares while the slab is still warm and pliable, then break along the marks once fully cold.
- Storage"A dry place" is the operative phrase. High-boiled sugar candies pull moisture from the air and turn sticky, so wrap the pieces individually in waxed paper and keep them airtight rather than loose in a box.
Caramels were a growth industry in America in the late nineteenth century: the cream caramel had moved from small confectioners' shops into factory production in the 1880s and 1890s, and a grand hotel of the period made its own candies in-house. The four pounds of glucose here is a marker of that moment. Corn-derived glucose syrup became cheap and widely available to the trade in the late nineteenth century, and confectioners adopted it quickly because it kept boiled sugar from turning grainy and gave a candy that held its texture on the shelf. The fruit extract is a period touch as well; flavoured cream caramels were made in the same way, the flavour added at the very end of the boil so the volatile oils were not driven off by the heat.