Maple Candy
1 cupful maple sugar 1/2 cupful brown sugar 1 tablespoonful Crisco 1/4 teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful vanilla extract 1 cupful water Dissolve sugars in water in saucepan over fire, when boiling add Crisco and salt and boil until it hardens when dropped in cold water, or 258° F. Remove from fire and add vanilla. Pour into Criscoed tins. When half cold mark into squares. Wrap in waxed paper.
A straightforward boiled-sugar candy, though the ingredient list as printed here is incomplete — the sugars and the Crisco quantity have dropped out of the text, and the method is all that survives intact.
- The missing quantitiesThe instructions call for "sugars" (plural) and Crisco, but no amounts appear in this transcription. Any figures supplied for them would be guesswork, not the book's own.
- 258°F is the hinge258° F is the hinge -- That falls within the hard-ball range. Below it the candy stays sticky and will not cut; much above it and it turns brittle. Use a calibrated thermometer and trust it over the cold-water test, which is hard to read within a few degrees.
- The cold-water test"Hardens when dropped in cold water" means the dropped syrup forms a ball firm enough to hold its shape but still yielding when pressed. Keep a cup of genuinely cold water beside the pan and change it as it warms.
- "Criscoed tins"Simply a shallow pan wiped with shortening. A square 8-inch pan works; the candy should be about half an inch deep so the squares hold together.
- Mark while warm"When half cold" is the whole trick to clean squares. Score the surface with an oiled knife while the slab is still warm and slightly pliable, then snap along the lines once fully set. Cutting cold candy shatters it.
- Adding the vanilla off the fireExtract flashes off in boiling syrup. Stir it in only after the pan is off the heat, and stir minimally — agitating hot sugar encourages premature crystallization.
- Maple sugar todaySold as granulated maple sugar or in pressed cakes at specialty grocers and from producers. Maple syrup is not a substitute here without recalculating the liquid.
- YieldWith the sugar quantities missing there is no way to state a yield from this text. Wrapped in waxed paper as directed, the squares keep a couple of weeks in a tin.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913 to teach American cooks what to do with hydrogenated cottonseed oil, a product that had no culinary tradition behind it. Its purpose is visible in this recipe: maple candy has long been made in New England and eastern Canada, traditionally with little more than sugar and a little butter, and the Crisco here does exactly the job butter did: it interferes with crystal formation and keeps the finished candy from turning grainy. Sugaring-off parties, where boiled maple syrup was poured onto snow or into tins, were a spring fixture in maple country, and cookbooks of the period carried these candies alongside chocolate confections. That a corporate promotional volume includes a candies section at all reflects how thoroughly Procter & Gamble intended Crisco to displace butter and lard across every part of the kitchen, not merely in frying and pastry.