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Molasses Candy
Mrs. Benham.
One cup molasses, two cups of sugar, one tablespoon vinegar. a little butter and vanilla; boil ten minutes, then cool it enough to pull.
A standard nineteenth-century pulled taffy, written for a cook who judged sugar by eye and finger. The only real variable is temperature, and the original gives none.
- Ignore the ten minutes, use a thermometerBoiling time depends on your pan width and burner, so ten minutes means nothing on a modern hob. Cook to 260-270F (the hard-ball to soft-crack range) for candy that pulls into a chewy taffy; taken much hotter it turns brittle and will crack rather than stretch.
- Molasses, not blackstrapMolasses sold for table and baking use in this period was generally a lighter first- or second-boil syrup. Blackstrap is far more bitter and mineral and will dominate the sugar; use unsulphured light or dark molasses.
- The unmeasured butter and vanillaAbout a tablespoon of butter is right for this quantity. Add the vanilla off the heat, after the boiling stops, or the alcohol carries most of the flavour away.
- What the vinegar doesThe tablespoon of acid inverts some of the sucrose as it boils, which is what keeps the finished candy from going grainy. It is not there for taste and you will not detect it.
- Cooling before pullingPour onto a buttered marble slab or a buttered rimmed sheet and let it cool until you can handle the edges, folding them inward as they set. Pull with buttered hands; the mass will lighten in colour and turn opaque as air works in, which takes ten to fifteen minutes.
- Cutting and keepingPull into a rope, cut with buttered scissors, and wrap each piece in waxed paper. Unwrapped, and especially in humid weather, the candy absorbs moisture from the air and can weld into one lump within a day or so.
- YieldOne cup molasses and two cups sugar gives roughly a pound and a quarter of finished candy, or about sixty small pieces.
- HeatSugar at 265F sticks to skin and keeps burning. Keep a bowl of cold water at the stove and do not test the syrup with a bare finger, whatever the older books say.
Molasses candy of this kind was the centrepiece of the taffy pull, a domestic amusement common in American and Canadian households through the second half of the nineteenth century: the syrup was boiled, poured out, and worked by pairs of guests with buttered hands, which made a party out of a step that is genuinely easier with four hands than two. Molasses was the cheap sweetener of the era, a byproduct of cane refining that arrived in barrels and cost a fraction of loaf sugar, so a candy built on one cup of molasses to two of sugar was an economical treat rather than a luxury. The Home Cook Book, compiled in Toronto in 1877 from contributions by named local women, is one of the earliest North American community cookbooks, and recipes like Mrs. Benham's, terse and assuming a great deal of shared knowledge, are typical of the form: they were written down as reminders among people who already knew how the thing was done.