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Sugar Caramels
One-half cake of chocolate, one and one-half pounds brown sugar, one cupful of milk, butter size of an egg; put all together and boil until it hardens on being dropped into water; stir while boiling.
A short, plain caramel of the sort that filled the candy chapter of every turn-of-the-century household book. The whole thing rests on cooking the syrup to the right stage, which the original describes only by feel.
- Half a cake of chocolateGrocery chocolate then came as a solid unsweetened cake, usually 8 oz scored into 1 oz squares, so half a cake is roughly 4 oz of unsweetened baking chocolate. Cake sizes were not standard between brands, so treat this as approximate rather than exact.
- Butter size of an eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. Old books used the egg as a volume gauge for solid fats.
- The hinge: the water test"Boil until it hardens on being dropped into water" is the cold-water test. The recipe's "hardens" suggests cooking at least to the firm-ball stage; for caramels that stay chewable, stop around 245-250F on a thermometer, where a drop in cold water forms a ball that holds its shape but still yields to a squeeze. Cook much beyond that and the candy turns progressively harder and less chewy.
- Pan and stirringMilk, sugar and chocolate scorch readily. Use a heavy saucepan at least three times the volume of the mixture, since it climbs when it boils, and keep the spoon moving across the bottom throughout as the recipe directs.
- Brown sugarNineteenth-century brown sugar was less uniform than today's. Light brown gives a cleaner caramel flavour; dark brown reads more of molasses and can taste faintly bitter against the unsweetened chocolate.
- Finishing, which the recipe omitsPour into a buttered square pan, let it firm until it is set enough to mark, then score into squares while still warm and cut through when cool. Waiting until it is cold makes cutting difficult.
- YieldRoughly 1 3/4 to 2 lb of candy. Wrap in waxed paper if they are to be kept, or they will weld together.
Chewy caramels were a major American candy-shop product of the 1880s and 1890s, made commercially in factories from Lancaster to Chicago before chocolate bars overtook them, and home cookbooks of the period commonly carried a candy chapter. What is called a caramel here is a milk-and-sugar candy cooked to the firm-ball stage, not caramelised sugar in the French sense; the browning comes from the brown sugar and the slow cooking of the milk solids rather than from scorching the sugar itself. The instruction to judge doneness by dropping a bead of syrup into cold water was the standard method before household thermometers were common, and it remains a reliable check for anyone who wants to confirm what the dial says.