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Molasses Candy (II)
Julia French.
One cup molasses, one cup sugar, one tablespoon vinegar, piece of butter size of an egg; boil (but do not stir) until it hardens when dropped in cold water; then stir in a teaspoon of soda, and pour on buttered tins; when cool, pull and cut in sticks.
Or, two cups sugar, two tablespoons vinegar, boil; when done add a teaspoon soda, cool and pull, or cut in squares without pulling; do not stir while it is boiling.
A straightforward pulled molasses taffy from the era before candy thermometers. The whole recipe turns on the cold-water test, so read that point first.
- The hinge: cold-water test"Hardens when dropped in cold water" points to one of the firm stages, somewhere between hard-ball and hard-crack (very roughly 265-310F on a modern thermometer); the recipe names no temperature. A drop should set firm rather than flatten; anything softer and the finished taffy will sag and stick instead of pulling.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Nineteenth-century writers measured butter by eye against familiar objects because it came in irregular lumps, not sticks.
- Soda means baking sodaA teaspoon of bicarbonate stirred into the hot syrup foams up violently and lightens the texture. Use a pan at least three times the depth of the syrup, and have the buttered tins ready before you add it.
- Do not stirThe instruction is repeated twice for good reason. Agitating a boiling sugar syrup seeds crystallization and turns the batch grainy. Wash any crystals down from the pan sides with a wet brush instead.
- The second version is missing its liquidThe second version gives no liquid -- Two cups sugar with only two tablespoons vinegar is very little moisture, and the sugar risks scorching or melting unevenly. A little water may have been assumed, but no amount appears in the text, so treat this variant as incomplete.
- PullingLet the slab cool until it can be handled, butter or lightly oil your hands, and pull until the candy turns from dark brown to opaque tan. It stiffens fast, so cut into sticks before it sets hard.
- YieldThe first version makes roughly a pound of candy.
Molasses candy pulls belonged to the social calendar as much as to the kitchen: the "taffy pull" was a standard winter evening entertainment in nineteenth-century American and Canadian households, since the candy has to be worked by hand while warm and several pairs of buttered hands make short work of it. Molasses was the cheap sweetener of the period, a byproduct of cane sugar refining and far less costly than loaf or granulated sugar, which is why the second variation, made with sugar alone, reads as the more expensive option.