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Sugar Toffee
Mrs. Joseph B. Leake.
Three pounds best brown sugar, one pound butter, enough water to moisten the sugar; boil until crisp when dropped into cold water, then pour into pans, or upon platters, as thin as possible. It usually requires to boil fast, without stirring, three-quarters of an hour
A straight butter-and-brown-sugar toffee at a scale suited to a large household. Everything depends on reading the cold-water test correctly; a thermometer removes the guesswork.
- The hinge: hard crack"Crisp when dropped into cold water" is the hard-crack stage, 300-310F (149-154C). Below that the toffee stays chewy and sticks to teeth; much above 310F the sugar begins to scorch and turns bitter.
- Scale it downThree pounds of sugar to a pound of butter fills several large trays. A quarter of the recipe — 12 oz brown sugar, 4 oz butter, about 3 tablespoons water — is enough for one 9x13 pan and behaves the same.
- "Enough water to moisten"Genuinely vague, and it does not matter much: the water only dissolves the sugar and boils away. Roughly a quarter cup per pound of sugar is plenty, and using less simply shortens the timing.
- Best brown sugarNineteenth-century brown sugars came in a range of grades, and what a given household meant by "best brown" is not recoverable from the text. Modern dark brown sugar gives a deeper, more caramel result; light brown a milder, paler toffee.
- Three-quarters of an hourThat reflects a big pan on a slow coal range. A modern burner with a quarter batch reaches hard crack in 15-20 minutes. Go by temperature, not the clock.
- Do not stirThe instruction is deliberate. Stirring after the sugar has dissolved drags crystals up the pan wall and can seed the whole batch grainy. Swirl the pan if you must, and wash down the sides with a wet brush early on.
- SeparationButter-heavy toffee can break, leaving a slick of fat on top. Keep the boil steady rather than furious, and if it does split, remove from the heat and stir in a spoonful of hot water to bring it back together.
- Pans and pouringLine trays with parchment or a silicone mat, or butter them well; ungreased platters will not release. Pour thin as directed, score into squares while still soft, and break along the lines once cold.
- Yield and keepingThe full recipe makes roughly four pounds of toffee. Stored airtight with parchment between layers it keeps for weeks; humidity is the enemy, and it will go tacky in an open dish.
Toffee of this kind — sugar and butter boiled hard, nothing else — belongs to the plain end of nineteenth-century confectionery, the sort of thing made at home rather than bought from a confectioner. The name is generally traced to the north of England in the early 1800s, where "taffy" and "toffee" were used more or less interchangeably before the two words drifted apart, and pulled taffy became a distinct American amusement. That brown sugar rather than white is specified is telling: refined loaf sugar was the expensive product, and unrefined brown was both cheaper and, in a candy meant to taste of caramel, better suited. Like most items in The Home Cook Book, this one arrives under a contributor's name — the book was assembled from recipes donated by Chicago women to raise money for the Home for the Friendless, and its authority rests on the reputations of the households that supplied it.