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Vanilla Caramel
Place one and a half pounds granulated sugar in a copper basin with three-quarters pint thick cream and a vanilla bean split in two, mix well until sugar is thoroughly dissolved, then set on the fire and boil until it attains the third degree. Remove vanilla, drop preparation on a lightly oiled marble, keeping one-third-inch in thickness by means of iron rods placed around it. Let thoroughly cool off, cut in half-inch square pieces, wrap in wax papers, and it will be ready for use. The vanilla caramels (or any other kind) can be flavoured with any kind of liquor if desired.
A pure cream caramel with no butter, glucose or corn syrup, so the whole outcome rests on how you handle the sugar. A few of the instructions assume a professional confectioner's bench.
- "The third degree"Nineteenth-century books graded boiling sugar by feel and by thread as well as by thermometer, and the numbering varied from book to book, so this is genuinely ambiguous. For a caramel that holds a cut square yet chews rather than shatters, cooks today take the syrup to the firm-ball stage, 245-250F.
- Cream measureThree-quarters of a pint is 1 1/2 US cups; if you read it as an imperial pint, 15 fl oz. "Thick cream" is best read as heavy cream, around 36 percent fat or better; a lighter cream is more likely to break under a long boil.
- Copper basinAn unlined copper confectioner's pan conducts fast and evenly. Any heavy-bottomed saucepan works, but choose one at least three times the volume of the mixture, because a sugar-and-cream boil climbs the sides.
- Dissolve first, then leave it aloneThis is the hinge. Stir only until the sugar is fully dissolved, wash any grains off the pan sides with a wet brush, and after that stir just enough to keep the cream from catching on the bottom. Agitating a hot supersaturated syrup with no glucose in it invites the whole batch to seize into a grainy mass.
- ScorchingMilk solids sink and burn well below the finishing temperature. Keep the heat moderate and move a heatproof spatula across the base of the pan rather than whipping the mixture.
- Marble and iron rodsThe rods are caramel bars, set on the slab as a square frame to hold the poured sheet at an even thickness. A rimmed sheet pan lined with lightly oiled parchment, or four lengths of clean metal bar, does the same job; 1/3 inch is the target depth.
- Cutting and wrappingCut while the sheet is set but not cold, with an oiled heavy knife or a pizza wheel. Waxed paper is still the right wrapper -- unwrapped caramels weld together within hours in any humidity.
- YieldAbout two pounds of finished candy, which at half-inch squares runs to well over a hundred pieces. The liquor variation should be stirred in off the heat, an ounce or two at most, since more will soften the set.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906); Filippini spent decades at Delmonico's in New York, and the confectionery section reads like bench notes from a professional kitchen -- copper basins, a marble slab, iron caramel bars, all standard equipment for a hotel candy department and almost none of it found in a home kitchen of the period. The English word caramel came in from French, itself generally traced through Spanish and ultimately to a Late Latin term for a sugar cane or honeycomb; by the time of this book it had settled in American usage on exactly this thing, a chewy cooked-cream sweet cut in squares. Its rise was recent. Milk and cream caramels were a major branch of the American candy trade in the 1880s and 1890s -- Milton Hershey's first successful business was a caramel company, sold off to fund chocolate -- and vanilla was the default flavour against which "or any other kind" was measured.