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Taffy
One cupful of molasses, one cupful of sugar, three tablespoonfuls of butter, three of vinegar.
The book gives the formula and nothing else, which was normal for candy chapters of the period — every cook was assumed to know the pulling routine. Here is what the missing method amounts to.
- The hinge: temperatureCook the syrup to roughly 255-270F, the hard-ball stage, just short of soft-crack. Below that the taffy will not hold a pull and stays sticky; much above it and it tends toward brittle rather than chewy candy.
- Cold-water testWithout a thermometer, drop a little syrup into cold water: it should form a firm ball that holds its shape but still yields to hard pressure.
- What the vinegar doesThree tablespoons of vinegar inverts part of the sucrose as it boils, which helps keep the finished taffy smooth instead of grainy. It is a working ingredient, not a flavoring, and should not be reduced.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cane molasses rather than blackstrap, which is more bitter and lower in sugar and will dominate the candy.
- Handling the boilStir only until the sugar dissolves, then leave it alone and wash any crystals from the pan sides with a wet brush. Stirring a boiling sugar syrup can seed crystallization, and taffy that grains is hard to rescue.
- Pouring and pullingTurn the syrup onto a buttered marble slab or a well-greased rimmed sheet, let it cool until it can be handled, then pull with buttered hands until it lightens in color and turns opaque — usually ten to fifteen minutes. Cut into pieces with scissors and wrap each one, or they will fuse.
- YieldAbout a pound of candy, roughly forty small pieces. It is best the day it is made; humidity turns it soft and sticky within a day or two.
- Pan sizeUse a heavy saucepan at least three times the volume of the ingredients. Molasses syrups foam up sharply as they pass the boiling stage.
Molasses taffy belongs to the era when molasses, not refined sugar, was the cheap sweetener in an American pantry, and when candy-making was a parlor amusement as much as a kitchen task. The "taffy pull" — cooking a syrup, then cooling it enough for two people to work it back and forth between greased hands — was a standard winter and Hallowe'en entertainment in the nineteenth century, which is why cookbooks of this period print the proportions and skip the method: the point was the pulling, and everyone present already knew how. The word itself appears in British English earlier than American and its origin is unsettled; it is generally treated as a dialect term of unknown source rather than traced to any particular person or place. Its cousin in these books is "molasses candy," the same syrup poured out and left unpulled to set hard.