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Everton Taffy
1 gill water. 2 cupfuls brown sugar 4 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 teaspoonful vanilla extract Pinch cream of tartar 1/4 teaspoonful salt Put sugar and water into saucepan; stir occasionally until it boils; then add cream of tartar. Put cover on pan and boil five minutes, add Candies Crisco and salt and boil until, when tried in cold water it will snap, or 300° F. Add vanilla and pour into Criscoed tin. Mark in squares when half cold, and break up when quite cold. Wrap in waxed paper.
A hard-crack sugar candy from Procter & Gamble's 1913 Crisco promotional cookbook. The ingredient list is incomplete, and the temperature is the part to get right.
- The missing waterWater appears in the method but never in the ingredient list — a typesetting casualty. Enough to dissolve the sugar is all that is needed; roughly a half cup to two cups of sugar is the usual proportion for a boiled taffy, but the original gives no figure and you are making a judgment call.
- 300°F is the hingeUse a candy thermometer rather than the cold-water snap test. At 300°F you are at hard crack; ten degrees short gives a taffy that stays tacky and slumps, and much past 310°F the brown sugar begins to scorch and turn bitter.
- CriscoPlain vegetable shortening, then a novelty ingredient the book existed to sell. Unsalted butter can be substituted and tastes better, though it carries water and milk solids and so browns and behaves a little differently in the boil.
- "Criscoed tin"A greased shallow pan. An 8-inch square metal pan, buttered or lined with parchment, is right for this quantity.
- Cream of tartar's jobIt inverts some of the sucrose so the candy sets glassy rather than grainy. A pinch is genuinely all that is wanted — too much leaves the batch soft and sticky.
- Do not stir after it boilsThe instruction to stir applies only until dissolution. Agitating a boiling syrup, or leaving sugar crystals on the pan wall, seeds crystallisation and the batch goes sandy. The five minutes covered is there to wash those crystals down with steam.
- Marking and breakingScore deeply with a buttered knife when the sheet is still warm enough to give but firm enough to hold a line. Once fully cold it breaks along the scores; hit it any earlier and it bends instead.
- Yield and keepingRoughly three-quarters of a pound to a pound, depending on how firmly the sugar is packed; perhaps 30 small squares. Hard-crack candy pulls moisture from the air and turns sticky, so wrap in waxed paper as directed and store airtight; avoid making it on a humid day.
Everton taffy takes its name from Everton, now a district of Liverpool, where a hard boiled toffee was sold from the eighteenth century onward and became a local specialty; the traditional account credits a cottager known as Molly Bushell with commercialising it in the 1750s, though the details are more legend than record. By the Victorian period "Everton toffee" was a generic British term for a brittle butterscotch-type sweet, and it crossed into American cookbooks under both spellings. Its appearance here is the point of the whole volume: The Story of Crisco (1913) was written to prove that Procter & Gamble's new hydrogenated cottonseed shortening could stand in for butter and lard in every corner of the household repertoire, candy included. A recipe whose British original depends entirely on butter for its flavour is an odd choice for the demonstration, which tells you something about how thoroughly the book meant to cover the ground.