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Popcorn Crisp
Pop a big breadpan full of corn. Let some one else make in the meantime some molasses taffy of one cupful of New Orleans molasses, half a cupful of granulated sugar, one tablespoonful of vinegar, and butter the size of a hickory nut. Cook the syrup until it spins a hair. Then work it into the corn until all the kernels slightly adhere to each other. Do not make it into balls, as it will be less light and delicate in that way.
A two-pair job by design: the corn is popped while the syrup cooks, and the two have to meet while both are still hot. Everything else here turns on how far you take the sugar.
- "Until it spins a hair"An old test read by eye rather than by thermometer. It is usually taken as the thread stage, around 230-235F, at which the coating will stay soft and tacky rather than crisp; but similar wording is used in period books for firmer stages, and taffy syrups were generally boiled a good deal higher. For a coating that shatters cleanly on the kernel, a hard-crack reading of 300-310F will give it.
- New Orleans molassesUnsulphured cane molasses of the first or second boiling, mild and sweet. Modern light or full-flavour molasses stands in directly. Blackstrap is a different product entirely and will turn the batch bitter.
- Butter the size of a hickory nutA teaspoon or two. Hickory nuts run a little under an inch across, and nut-sized butter measures of this kind appear routinely in American cookbooks of the period.
- A breadpan full of cornOn the order of three to four quarts of popped corn, from roughly half a cup of unpopped kernels, though "big breadpan" fixes nothing exactly. Much more corn than that and the coating will not go round.
- The vinegar is doing workA tablespoon of acid inverts some of the sugar and keeps the syrup from crystallising into a grainy mess as it cools. Do not leave it out.
- Warm the corn firstHot syrup poured on cool popcorn sets before it can be tossed. Hold the popped corn in a 200F oven in a large buttered bowl or roasting pan, and work quickly once the syrup comes off the heat.
- Sort the unpopped kernelsShake the popped corn so the old maids fall to the bottom of the pan and lift the good corn off the top. A tooth finds them otherwise.
- YieldRoughly the same volume you started with, three to four quarts, which fills a large tin. Store airtight; molasses draws damp and the crisp softens within a day or two in a humid kitchen.
Molasses and popped corn were two of the cheapest sweet things in an American pantry at the end of the nineteenth century, and the popcorn ball was their standard union at Hallowe'en, church socials and Christmas trees. This recipe is a deliberate refusal of the ball: pressing the coated corn into a sphere compacts it, and the author wants the kernels only just tacked to one another so the whole thing stays airy. Commercial versions of the same idea were being sold at fairs and midways in these years, and the loose, glazed style eventually became the dominant form. "New Orleans molasses" seems to have functioned as much as a grade name as a strict origin claim, denoting the lighter cane syrups of the Louisiana sugar houses as against the darker West Indian blackstrap sold for stock feed and rum.