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Honey Squares
1 cupful strained honey 1/2 cupful cream 1/4 teaspoonful salt 2 tablespoonfuls Crisco Pinch cream of tartar 1 cupful brown sugar 1 teaspoonful lemon extract Put Crisco, salt, honey, cream and sugar into saucepan; saucepan; stir over slow fire until dissolved, then add cream of tartar. Boil until it forms a hard ball when tested in cold water, or 252° F. Remove from fire, stir in lemon extract, and pour into Criscoed tin. Mark into squares before cold. Wrap in waxed paper.
Sufficient for twenty-five squares. 1 cupful maple sugar ½ cupful brown sugar 1 tablespoonful Crisco
A honey-and-brown-sugar caramel boiled to the hard-ball stage, close in character to a chewy taffy or old-fashioned honey chew. It needs a thermometer and very little else.
- The temperature is the recipe252°F sits at the lower end of the hard-ball range (roughly 250-265°F). A few degrees low gives a sticky mass that never sets into squares; taken much higher the candy will be correspondingly harder and less chewy. Use a calibrated candy thermometer and check it in boiling water first (it should read 212°F at sea level, lower at altitude, and you should subtract the same difference from 252°F).
- CriscoThe book is an advertisement for hydrogenated vegetable shortening, but here it is simply a fat for softness and for greasing the pan. Butter works and adds flavour; any neutral solid shortening behaves as written.
- "Criscoed tin"A greased shallow pan. An 8-inch square tin gives squares of a sensible depth for twenty-five pieces; line it with parchment and grease that instead if you want to lift the slab out whole.
- Cream"Cream" in period recipes covered a wide range of fat contents, so modern heavy cream is a reasonable choice here. The milk solids can scorch, which is presumably why the recipe starts over a slow fire; stir until the sugar is fully dissolved before you let it boil.
- Cream of tartarA pinch is about 1/8 teaspoon. It inverts some of the sugar and keeps the candy from turning grainy. Add it after dissolving, as directed, not at the start.
- Marking the squaresScore the surface with an oiled knife while the slab is still warm and pliable, roughly ten minutes after pouring. Once cold it will crack rather than cut.
- Lemon extractA teaspoon of extract in this quantity is assertive by modern taste. Stir it in off the heat as directed, or the alcohol carries most of the aroma away.
- StorageHoney candies pull moisture from the air and go tacky. Wrapping each square in waxed paper, as the original says, is not decoration; keep them in a tin in a dry place.
- YieldTwenty-five squares, about 1 1/2 inches each from an 8-inch pan.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with a wholly new product: cottonseed oil hardened by hydrogenation into a shelf-stable white solid fat. Nearly every recipe in it inserts Crisco somewhere, sometimes convincingly and sometimes, as in a boiled honey candy, as a token gesture. The candy itself belongs to a much older domestic tradition of boiled sugar work, in which cooks judged the stage by dropping syrup into cold water and feeling the ball, which is why this recipe gives both the old test and a temperature in degrees. Honey as a partial substitute for sugar was common in such receipts, valued for keeping the finished sweet chewy rather than hard.