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Chocolate Caramels (Boil together until it spins)
Boil together until it spins a hair, one and a half cupfuls of molasses, three-quarters of a cupful of granulated sugar, three squares of chocolate and a piece of butter the size of a large walnut. Pour into shallow buttered tins and mark into squares as soon as it is hard enough. Wrap each piece in waxed paper.
A four-ingredient molasses caramel with no cream or milk in it, which makes it closer to a chocolate taffy than to the buttery caramels sold today. Everything depends on reading the sugar stage correctly.
- "Spins a hair"This is the thread stage of the old cold-water and spoon tests: syrup drawn from the spoon trails a fine thread, roughly 230-235F. At that temperature the finished candy will be soft and chewy at room temperature and will sag in warm weather. Cooks who want a caramel that holds a cut square take it to firm-ball, about 245-248F; the original leaves this genuinely ambiguous, so decide before you start which texture you are after.
- Three squares of chocolateBaking chocolate was sold in scored one-ounce squares, so this means 3 oz of unsweetened chocolate. Modern bars vary in total weight and in how they are scored, so weigh rather than count. Semisweet will make the candy noticeably sweeter and softer.
- Butter the size of a large walnutAbout 1 oz, or 2 tablespoons. The butter is there for mouthfeel and to keep the mass from sticking; it is not enough to emulsify, so the candy may look slightly oily as it cools.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and low in sugar. Molasses scorches faster than plain syrup, so use a heavy pan, stir at the bottom, and keep the heat moderate once the mixture darkens.
- The panA shallow buttered tin of about 8 by 8 inches gives a slab roughly half an inch thick from this quantity. Butter it generously; there is no corn syrup here to guard against grain, and a stuck slab will shatter rather than lift.
- Marking into squaresScore with a buttered knife while the slab is set but still warm and yielding, then break or cut along the lines once cold. Wait until it is fully hard and it will crack unpredictably.
- WrappingWaxed paper is not decorative. Molasses candy is hygroscopic and unwrapped pieces will stick together into a mass if left loose in a tin.
Chocolate caramels of this kind belong to the great American molasses-candy tradition rather than to the French caramel au beurre; there is no cream in the pan, and the chocolate is doing the work that dairy does in a modern recipe. Home candy making expanded sharply in the second half of the nineteenth century, as cheap granulated sugar and factory-pressed baking chocolate in scored squares made the ingredients ordinary rather than luxurious, and "candy making" became a standard chapter in general household manuals like this one. The instruction to test by spinning a hair reflects a kitchen without a thermometer: cooks learned the sugar stages by the behavior of syrup dropped in cold water or drawn from a spoon, a vocabulary of thread, soft ball, hard ball and crack that survived in print long after the candy thermometer became cheap. Wrapping each piece in waxed paper was the period's answer to a candy that would otherwise fuse in the tin.