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Candy
Carrie A.
One-half pound sugar, one-half cup syrup, butter the size of a walnut ; add little water to the syrup, and have the sugar thoroughly dissolved; to try it, drop a spoonful in a glass of ice water, if brittle, it is done.
A bare-bones boiled sugar candy of the kind that was made in minutes on a coal range. The whole recipe hinges on one thing: the temperature you stop at, which the original tests by feel in ice water.
- The measurementsHalf a pound of sugar is a generous cup of granulated sugar (roughly 1 1/8 cups); "butter the size of a walnut" is usually reckoned at one to two tablespoons. "A little water" is genuinely vague — two to three tablespoons is enough to dissolve the sugar, and any excess simply boils off.
- What "syrup" meantIn a Chicago kitchen of the 1870s this is molasses or a light sugar syrup, not corn syrup, which did not reach American grocers in bottles until around the turn of the century. Molasses gives a dark, taffy-like candy; golden syrup or corn syrup gives a pale one and does the same job of discouraging crystallisation.
- The hinge: dissolve before you boil"Have the sugar thoroughly dissolved" is the instruction that decides whether this works. Undissolved grains on the side of the pan seed the whole batch and you get a grainy mass instead of clear brittle candy. Stir only until the syrup is clear, then stop stirring entirely.
- Reading the cold-water testBrittle in ice water is the hard-crack stage, 300–310F on a candy thermometer. If the dropped syrup goes soft and pliable instead of snapping, it is still in the soft-ball or firm-ball range and needs more boiling.
- Pan and pourUse a heavy saucepan with a light interior so you can see the colour change, and have a buttered sheet pan or marble slab ready before you start. At 300F the syrup keeps cooking in the pan, so pour immediately.
- FlavouringThe original gives none. A quarter teaspoon of vanilla, a few drops of peppermint or lemon oil, or a pinch of salt goes in off the heat, after the boiling stops, or the volatile flavour cooks away.
- YieldAround three-quarters of a pound of finished candy — one small sheet, enough to break into a bowlful for four or five people. It keeps a few days in a tin, but turns sticky in humid weather.
The Home Cook Book, usually dated 1874 with later printings, was compiled by "the ladies of Chicago" and sold to raise money for the Home for the Friendless; it is often described as an early American charitable community cookbook, though Maria J. Moss's 1864 A Poetical Cook-Book is commonly given the title of first, and its contributions are signed the way this one is, with a name like Carrie A. That format explains the brevity: it became understood that the cook knew how to boil sugar, so the only details worth writing down were the proportions and the test. Boiled sugar candy of this sort was among the cheapest domestic sweets of the period: sugar had fallen steadily in price through the century, molasses was a staple of every pantry, and the cold-water test was the standard household substitute for a thermometer well into the 1900s.