Old Fashioned Molasses Candy
Ingredients
Directions
Make the candy
In a large kettle, pour in the molasses.
Boil slowly over medium heat for about 30 minutes, stirring constantly.
If it threatens to overflow, move it to the back of the stove or reduce the heat.
Drop a small amount into cold water.
If it snaps like a pipe-stem, add the carbonate of soda. Stir quickly.
Pour into greased pans to cool.
Pull and finish
Once cool enough to handle, pull the candy until it lightens in color.
Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.
Explore the science
What each ingredient does
- Molasses
- Forms the candy base, providing sweetness, deep flavor and the body that hardens as it cooks.
- Carbonate of soda
- Reacts with the hot syrup to add gas bubbles, lightening the color and giving the candy a porous, tender texture.
The step that matters
Testing the cold-water snap. Molasses must reach the hard-crack stage before the soda is added. Cooking it too little leaves a sticky candy, while cooking it too long makes it brittle and scorched. Checking a drop in cold water shows when it is ready.
“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.
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