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Tea Caramels
The above article is to be prepared in same manner as vanilla caramels using using, in addition, a gill very strongly made tea.
This is a variation entry rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you have the book's vanilla caramel method in front of you and simply adds a measure of concentrated tea. What matters is how that extra liquid behaves in a sugar boil.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fluid ounces, in American usage; an imperial gill is 5 fluid ounces. Either way it is a substantial amount of liquid to add to a caramel batch and will lengthen the cooking noticeably.
- "Very strongly made tea"Brew it several times stronger than you would for drinking, using extra leaf rather than extra time, and strain well. Ordinary-strength tea will boil away to nothing detectable once the sugar has been reduced.
- Tannin and bitternessLong steeping extracts more tannin, which can turn harsh when concentrated by boiling. Strong is not the same as stewed; use more leaf rather than more time.
- When to add itAdd the tea at the start, with the other liquids, so it reduces along with everything else. Stirring cold liquid into a nearly finished caramel drops the temperature and risks graining.
- The hinge: temperature, not timeThe extra liquid means the batch takes considerably longer to come up. The recipe gives no temperature or stage; for caramels of this type modern practice works to a thermometer at roughly 245-250F, the range older books call firm ball and test by dropping a little into cold water.
- Pan and coolingUse a heavy saucepan at least four times the volume of the mixture; caramel with cream in it climbs. Pour into a buttered 8-inch square pan, let it set several hours at room temperature, then cut with an oiled knife and wrap each piece in waxed paper.
- YieldThe book's vanilla caramel recipe is not reproduced here, so the yield depends on it; an 8-inch square pan cut into one-inch pieces gives about 64 caramels.
Chewy cream caramels were a comparatively young confection: they depend on cheap refined sugar, reliable cream and glucose syrup, all of which became widely available to American candy makers only in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the trade grew fast enough to make fortunes — Milton Hershey's Lancaster Caramel Company, founded in the 1880s, was the business he sold to fund his chocolate works. Once a confectioner had a good vanilla base, the commercial logic was to spin variations off it with a single substitution in the same boil. The instruction to use tea "very strongly made" is practical rather than fussy, since a sugar syrup cooked to the firm-ball stage has driven off most of its water and with it most of a weak infusion's character.