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Cream Candy (Boil together two cupfuls)
Boil together two cupfuls of granulated sugar, one-half teaspoonful of cream of tartar, one tablespoonful of vinegar and one cupful of water, until it will snap when dropped in cold water. Pour at once on a greased platter and pull when cool enough to handle.
A bare-bones pulled sugar candy that depends entirely on reading the syrup correctly. Everything here hinges on how far you boil it.
- The cold-water test, in degrees"Snap when dropped in cold water" points to the crack stage; modern tables put hard crack at about 300-310F, though pulled candies are often taken to the lower end of the crack range so the mass stays workable. A drop should be brittle rather than bend; a syrup taken much softer will stay sticky and slack after pulling.
- Two acids, one jobBoth the cream of tartar and the vinegar invert some of the sucrose so the syrup resists crystallising while you work it. There is no need to add more of either — excess acid makes the finished candy sticky and slow to cream.
- Do not stir after it boilsStir only until the sugar dissolves. Once it is boiling, leave it alone and wash any crystals from the sides of the pan with a wet pastry brush, or the whole batch will grain.
- Pour, do not scrapeTip the syrup out and stop when the pan runs slow. The film clinging to the bottom is the most likely place for crystals to have formed, and scraping it onto the platter seeds the lot.
- The platterA large greased metal sheet or marble slab is easier to work on than a china platter, which conducts heat away less readily and may not take the thermal shock. Grease the edges as well; the syrup spreads further than expected.
- Cool enough to handleWait until the edges have set and the mass can be folded toward the centre without running. Butter your hands. Pull until the candy turns opaque, white and satiny.
- Cut while warmDraw the pulled rope out to finger thickness and cut it into pieces with buttered scissors before it hardens. Left whole, it sets into something no knife will divide cleanly.
- WeatherSugar candy of this kind fails on humid days — it absorbs moisture from the air and goes limp within hours. Make it in dry weather and store it airtight between layers of waxed paper.
- YieldTwo cups of sugar weighs somewhere near fourteen ounces, so expect close to a pound of finished candy, enough for a small dish.
Pulled cream candy belongs to the era of the candy pull, a domestic entertainment common in American households through the nineteenth century, when a batch of boiled sugar was poured out and worked by hand — often by several pairs of buttered hands at once — until it whitened. The whitening is mechanical rather than chemical: pulling folds air into the sugar in fine filaments that scatter light, turning a clear amber syrup opaque and pearly. Cream of tartar, a by-product of winemaking sold cheaply by every grocer, was the standard household anti-crystalliser before commercial glucose syrup became widely available, and the tablespoon of vinegar here does the same work by a cruder route. Its appearance in a general-purpose book like this one reflects how ordinary the skill was assumed to be: no thermometer is mentioned, no timing given, and the cook is simply expected to recognise the snap of a sample dropped in cold water, a test judged by feel and appearance.