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Cream Candy
One pound white sugar, one wineglass vinegar, one tumbler water, vanilla; boil one-half hour, and pull, if you choose.
A bare-bones sugar-boiling formula of the kind that assumes the cook already knows what pulled candy should look like. The proportions are sound; the instructions leave out everything a thermometer now tells you.
- The measuresA wineglass in American receipts of this era is about 2 fluid ounces, so a quarter cup of vinegar. A tumbler is a drinking glass, roughly 8 ounces, so one cup of water. One pound of white sugar is about 2¼ cups.
- Time is not the guide"Boil one-half hour" depends entirely on the width of your pan and the heat of your stove. Cook to temperature instead: somewhere in the 255-270F range is usual for a syrup soft enough to pull, and the higher you go the faster it will set on you. Without a thermometer, test in cold water and look for a ball that holds its shape but still gives under pressure.
- What the vinegar doesThe acid inverts some of the sucrose as it cooks, which keeps the syrup from crystallizing into a gritty mass and gives the finished candy its chew. It is doing much the same job corn syrup does in modern recipes, and much of its sharpness cooks off, though a faint tartness can remain.
- Vanilla goes in lastAdd it after the pan comes off the heat, once the syrup has stopped bubbling hard. A long boil finishing at high temperature will drive off much of the flavour if it goes in at the start.
- Pulling is not optional if you want cream candyThe whitening comes from air worked in and from the fine crystals pulling develops. Pour onto an oiled marble slab or a heavy oiled sheet pan, let it cool until you can handle it with buttered hands, then pull and fold repeatedly until it turns from clear amber to opaque satin-white. Unpulled, this is simply a clear hard candy.
- Don't stir once it boilsStir only until the sugar dissolves. After that, wash stray crystals down the side of the pan with a wet brush and leave it alone; a single crystal dragged back in can seed the whole batch.
- Yield and storageAbout one pound of candy, enough for 40 to 50 small pulled pieces. Cut with oiled scissors as it firms, wrap individually in wax paper, and keep airtight — pulled candy draws moisture from the air and goes sticky within a day otherwise.
Pulled cream candy belonged to the candy pull, a nineteenth-century American social occasion in which the cooling of the syrup gave a room full of young people a reason to work in pairs with buttered hands. The technique is the same one used for molasses taffy and for the pulled sugar work of professional confectioners, and the vinegar here is the household stand-in for the cream of tartar or glucose a confectioner would have reached for. Recipes this terse are characteristic of *The Home Cook Book*, compiled in the 1870s from contributions by Chicago housewives, which give the proportions and little else. Such brevity is itself a period feature — these community cookbooks scattered receipts among sketches, jokes and opinions rather than sorting them by course.