Cream Candy
1/2 cupful water 2 cupfuls brown sugar 3 tablespoonfuls Crisco, melted 1 teaspoonful orange extract 1/4 teaspoonful salt Dissolve sugar in water in saucepan over fire, and boil until it spins a heavy thread, add Crisco and salt and boil until it forms a soft ball when tested in cold water, or 240° F. Remove pan from fire, add orange extract, allow to stand five minutes, then stir until the syrup begins to "grain." Pour quickly into wet tin. When half cold, mark into squares; leave till following day in a cool place; then break up. Keep in airtight tins. Sufficient for twenty small squares.
A brown-sugar penuche in all but name, and one of the simpler candies in the book — the whole thing turns on the thermometer reading and on when you start stirring.
- The hinge: stir at the right momentCooling the syrup undisturbed for five minutes before stirring is what gives fine grain rather than coarse crystals. Stir too soon or scrape crystals off the pan sides in and the candy turns gritty.
- Temperature over visual tests"Spins a heavy thread" is roughly 230-234F, and the soft-ball stage the recipe puts at 240F is the figure to trust. Use a candy thermometer and ignore the thread test entirely.
- CriscoThe book's house shortening; any solid vegetable shortening works, as does an equal amount of unsalted butter, which adds flavour the original deliberately avoided. Three tablespoons in two cups of sugar is there to keep the candy tender, not to enrich it.
- Brown sugarPeriod brown sugar was probably less standardised than today's. Light brown gives a mild penuche; dark brown gives a molasses-forward candy and browns faster, so watch the pan.
- "Wet tin"A shallow tin rinsed with cold water and not dried, so the candy releases. The recipe gives no size, though the twenty-square yield implies a small pan. A lightly greased pan or one lined with parchment does the same job more reliably.
- Orange extractA teaspoon of extract in this quantity is assertive by modern taste. Add it off the heat, as directed, or the alcohol carries the aroma away.
- Marking and curingScore the squares while the slab is still warm enough to take a knife but firm enough to hold the lines. The overnight rest in a cool place lets the grain set; the candy breaks cleanly along the scores the next day.
- Yield and keepingAbout twenty small squares, roughly a pound. Airtight storage matters — brown-sugar candy draws moisture from humid air and goes sticky within a day or two if left open.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to introduce cooks to hydrogenated cottonseed oil, and its recipe section exists to prove the new fat could stand in for butter and lard anywhere in the kitchen — including the candy pan, where a fat that keeps at room temperature and carries no flavour of its own was a genuine selling point. The candy itself is the American brown-sugar family generally called penuche or panocha, from the Spanish panocha for raw sugar; "cream candy" was a loose nineteenth-century term for any boiled sugar worked to a fine grain. Recipes of this sort spread quickly once inexpensive candy thermometers reached home kitchens in the early twentieth century, which is why the book can give 240F alongside the older thread-and-cold-water tests rather than instead of them.