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Chocolate Caramels (Five pounds standard A sugar)
Five pounds standard A sugar, one pound of chocolate, two ounces butter, one teaspoonful cream tartar, one quart of water or cream; boil the sugar until it snaps by putting in cold water, add the chocolate grated fine; boil until it snaps as before. Flavor with vanilla.
A commercial-scale candy batch written for a cook who judged sugar by eye and ear rather than by thermometer. The proportions work, but two things in the text need pinning down before you start.
- Water or cream is not a free choiceA quart of water gives a hard chocolate toffee; a quart of cream gives a milk caramel that behaves entirely differently and will scorch on the bottom long before the sugar reaches temperature. If you use cream, work in a heavy pan over moderate heat and stir constantly; with water you can leave it largely alone.
- "Snaps" in cold waterDropping a little syrup into cold water and finding it brittle enough to snap is the hard-crack stage, 300-310F. That is toffee territory, not the chewy caramel a modern reader expects, which is cooked only to firm ball, 245-250F. Period candy makers used "caramel" loosely for both.
- Standard A sugarA nineteenth-century refiners' grade of fully refined white sugar. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct substitute, pound for pound.
- The chocolateOne pound of "chocolate" here is most likely unsweetened chocolate, the plain cakes sold for cooking. Grate or chop it finely as directed so it disperses before the syrup climbs back to temperature; chocolate chips or a sweetened bar will throw the sugar balance out.
- Cream of tartarOne teaspoon in five pounds of sugar inverts a little of the sucrose and keeps the batch from turning grainy. Do not leave it out, and wash any crystals down from the sides of the pan with a wet brush.
- The second boil is the risky oneOnce the chocolate goes in, the mixture is full of cocoa solids and butterfat and will catch and burn readily. Lower the heat, stir the bottom continuously, and test often rather than trusting a set time.
- Scale and yieldFive pounds of sugar plus a pound of chocolate yields roughly six pounds of candy. Quarter the recipe for a household batch. Score the slab into squares while it is still warm; once fully cold at hard-crack it will shatter rather than cut.
- Vanilla goes in lastAdd it off the heat, after the pan comes off the burner, or the alcohol carries the flavour straight off with the steam.
Caramels were a mainstay of American commercial candy making in the second half of the nineteenth century, and chocolate caramels sat at the fashionable end of the trade: a small confectioner could turn cheap refined sugar and a cake of baking chocolate into something that sold as a luxury. Milton Hershey is documented as having built his fortune on Lancaster caramels before he turned to milk chocolate bars in the early 1900s, which gives a sense of how much money there was in exactly this formula. This recipe begins with five pounds of sugar, and it appears in a household compendium's candy-making section, where the cook is expected to read a sugar stage from a bowl of cold water. Bought sweets were still expensive and adulteration of commercial candy was a live public worry, so making your own was both thrift and insurance.