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Everton Ice-Cream Candy
Squeeze the juice of one large lemon into a cup. Boil ore and one-half pounds moist white sugar, two ounces butter, one and a half tea-cups water, together with half the rind of the lemon, and when done (which may be known by its becoming quite crisp when dropped into cold water) set aside till the boiling has ceased, and then stir in the juice of the lemon, butter a dish and pour in about an inch thick. When cool take out peel (which may be dried), pull until white, draw out into sticks and check about four inches long with a knife. If you have no lemons, take two table-spoons vinegar and two tea-spoons lemon extract. The fire must be quick and the candy stirred all the time. - Mrs. J. S. R.
A pulled lemon taffy, called "ice-cream candy" for the opaque, pale color the sugar takes on after pulling rather than for any dairy in it. The whole recipe hinges on hitting the right sugar stage and on adding the lemon juice off the heat.
- The typo"Boil ore and one-half pounds" is a printer's error for "one and one-half pounds" of sugar. That is about 3 1/3 cups granulated.
- Moist white sugarA period grade of sugar sold slightly damp and less fully refined than modern granulated, before free-flowing granulated became standard. Ordinary granulated sugar is the usual substitute.
- Tea-cupsA period tea-cup is variously reckoned at about 6 to 8 fl oz, so one and a half is somewhere between one and one and a half cups of water. Two ounces butter is half a stick.
- "When done"The cold-water test described here — crisp and brittle, not merely firm — is the hard-crack stage, 300-310F on a candy thermometer. Below that the taffy will sag and never hold a stick shape; much above it the sugar begins to color and turn bitter.
- Why the juice goes in lastLemon juice added at the start would invert more of the sugar and keep the batch soft and sticky. Stirring it in after boiling stops gives the flavor without wrecking the set, and it also stops the mass spitting.
- StirringConstant stirring over a quick fire is here because butter and sugar will scorch on a bare pan bottom. Use a heavy saucepan with plenty of headroom, as the mixture foams as it boils.
- PullingLet the slab cool until you can handle it with buttered hands, then pull and fold repeatedly. The whitening is air worked into the sugar, and it takes several minutes of steady work; stop while the candy still has some give or it will crack rather than draw.
- The vinegar substituteTwo tablespoons vinegar plus two teaspoons lemon extract stands in for the juice and rind. It is doing two jobs — acid and flavor — and modern bottled lemon juice does both better.
- YieldRoughly a pound and a half of candy, drawn into four-inch sticks. Wrap them in waxed paper; in humid weather the surface will turn tacky within a day.
Everton taffy — also written Everton toffee — takes its name from Everton, now a district of Liverpool, and is traditionally credited to a local confectioner selling butter-and-sugar toffee there in the later eighteenth century; the attribution is repeated everywhere in Victorian cookery but is not firmly documented. English versions are usually a plain poured brittle, and what The Dixie Cook Book gives here is the American adaptation: the same butter-sugar-lemon boil, but pulled until it whitens, which is what earned it the name "ice-cream candy." Pulled candy of this sort was a fixture of the candy-pull, a domestic entertainment in which the tedious business of aerating hot sugar by hand was turned into a party. The initials at the end, "Mrs. J. S. R.," are typical of the book's method — a compilation of contributed household receipts credited only by initial.