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Chocolate Caramels (One cup of chocolate shaved)
One cup of chocolate shaved fine, one cup molasses, half cup milk, one cup sugar; when nearly done add a piece of butter size of a walnut. Stir until perfectly dissolved, but not after it begins to boil, as that will make it grain. It is done when it hardens and becomes brittle when dropped in cold water, but do not make too hard. Grease plates with butter, pour it on about half an inch thick, when nearly cool cut with a greased knife into small squares.
A molasses caramel rather than a modern cream caramel: no corn syrup, no thermometer, and the whole thing hinges on when you stop stirring. Read the crystallization note first.
- Stop stirring once it boilsThis is the instruction that decides success. Stirring a boiling sugar syrup drags crystals down from the pan sides and the batch turns grainy. Stir only until the sugar and chocolate have dissolved, then leave it alone; if crystals cling above the syrup line, wipe them down with a wet pastry brush instead of stirring.
- What "chocolate" means hereIn 1880s confectionery this is most likely unsweetened block chocolate rather than chips or sweetened bar chocolate. A cup shaved fine is somewhere in the range of 4 to 6 oz by weight, depending on how fine the shavings are. Unsweetened baking chocolate is the closest modern substitute.
- Butter the size of a walnutConventionally reckoned at roughly 1 to 2 tablespoons; the recipe adds it near the end, "when nearly done."
- The cold-water test, and its limitBrittle in cold water is the hard-crack stage, around 300F, which gives a candy you snap rather than chew. The caveat "do not make too hard" points lower: firm-ball to hard-ball, roughly 245 to 265F, drops that hold a firm shape and yield to a squeeze. A thermometer settles it faster than the water glass.
- Milk and scorchingMilk plus molasses plus chocolate all scorch readily. Use a heavy-bottomed saucepan, keep the heat moderate rather than high, and expect the mixture to foam up considerably as the milk proteins cook.
- Greased platesNineteenth-century kitchens poured candy onto buttered dinner plates or a marble slab. A buttered 8-inch square pan or a rimmed sheet lined with buttered parchment gives the half-inch depth called for with less mess.
- CuttingScore while still warm and pliable but set, the recipe's "when nearly cool." Fully cold molasses caramel shatters instead of cutting. Wrap the squares individually in wax paper or they will fuse back together.
- YieldWell over a pound of candy; roughly 50 to 60 one-inch squares from an 8-inch pan poured half an inch deep.
Molasses was a cheap and widely available sweetener in nineteenth-century American candy-making, though this recipe uses a full cup of refined sugar alongside it. The word caramel came into English from French, which took it from Spanish, in the sense of burnt sugar; by the 1880s American cookbooks used it loosely for any boiled sugar candy cut into squares, chewy or brittle, with or without cream. Chocolate in this period was commonly sold as a hard cake of ground roasted cacao by the block, which is why the recipe begins by shaving it rather than measuring it out. The Dixie Cook-Book, published in the 1880s, places candy alongside pickles and preserves as ordinary household production rather than a shop purchase, and the absence of both corn syrup and a thermometer here reflects a kitchen where cooks judged sugar stages by eye and a tumbler of cold water.