Old-fashioned Sugar Taffy Recipe

16-year-old Helena Muffly wrote exactly 100 years ago today:

Saturday, December 9, 1911: Was exceedingly busy this forenoon. Rufus went to Milton this morning so you see I had all the odd jobs to put in something like order but how long it will stay that way can soon be estimated. Ruthie treated us to candy this evening.

Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:

I wonder what kind of candy Grandma’s sister Ruth made. Taffy is a popular old-time candy.

My daughter and I recently made some taffy using an old Pennsylvania recipe from the early 20th century.

This is an excellent taffy recipe—and I really like that it doesn’t use corn syrup. The taffy was wonderfully creamy and smooth, and it has a nice flavor. It was almost too good–our family ate the entire bowl of candy in one week-end. (I’m trying very hard not to think about the calories.)

Making taffy is a fun family activity. I bet the old-time taffy pulls at parties were a blast.

But be sure to leave enough time. It probably took us close to two hours from start to finish. Don’t try to rush the process—or you may burn it or end up with taffy that doesn’t have the right consistency.

Sugar Taffy

One pound [2 cups] white sugar, one cup water, on-half teaspoonful cream of tartar, one-half teaspoonful vanilla, butter size of a hickory nut. Boil until hard in water. When cool, pull.

Lycoming Valley Cook Book, Ladies of Trout Run M.E. Church (1907)—1992 reprint of book

We combined all of the ingredients except the vanilla; and, assumed that butter the size of a hickory nut was about 1 tablespoon of butter.

We cooked over low heat, stirring until mixture began to boil, then we cooked, without stirring until the boiling mixture reached the hardboil stage.

And, we assumed that “boil until hard in water” meant to boil until the syrup reached the hardball stage.

The hardball stage is when a small amount of the syrup is dropped into cold water. If it can be gathered together to form a hard ball (though malleable when pressed), it is at the right stage—or just use a candy thermometer (255 – 265 degrees F).We removed from the heat and stirred in the vanilla. We divided the thick syrup into several parts and added additional flavoring (cinnamon oil, strawberry flavoring) to some of it. (We didn’t do it, but you may also want to add some food coloring so that you’ll be able to tell which pieces of candy have which flavor.)

We put in buttered dish; then waited a few minutes until it was cool enough to handle.

We then buttered our hands and pulled the candy until it became creamy and glossy (about 5 minutes). We formed ropes of candy on a piece of waxed paper; then cut with a knife that we periodically dipped in hot water.

Finally we wrapped the individual pieces in squares of waxed paper.

Old Recipe for Mulled Fig Juice (Ginger Cordial)

16-year-old Helena Muffly wrote exactly 100 years ago today:

Tuesday, December 5, 1911: We are going to have an entertainment on the fifteenth, the Friday before vacation, and I’m to take part in a dialogue of no great length. Such bewildering problems as we are having in Algebra is enough to turn your head.

Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:

Apparently the students were going to put to put on a small Christmas play on the 15th –or at least say the parts of various characters. [An aside—When I think of a dialogue I think of the Abbott and Costello dialogue about the baseball players—Who’s on first, What’s on second, I don’t know’s on third—though it’s from a later time period.]

Maybe Grandma took a break from the bewildering algebra problems to make a calming hot drink.

I found an awesome recipe for Mulled Fig Juice (Ginger Cordial) while browsing through the December 1911 issue of Good Housekeeping magazine.

Mulled Fig Juice reminded me a little of Mulled Cider, but the taste is more nuanced and complex. I’d highly recommend it for holiday parties—or for a great hot drink after sledding or cross-country skiing.

Mulled Fig Juice (Ginger Cordial)

1/2 pound figs (I used mission figs.)

1/2 teaspoon allspice

Dash of ginger

1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon cloves

water

3 pints ginger ale (about 1 1/2 liters)

1 teaspoon corn starch dissolved in a small amount of water

Peel from an orange (for garnish)

Stew slowly together the figs, allspice, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, and sufficient water to cover the other ingredients. When the figs are tender remove from heat and pour through a strainer. (The stewed figs taste good, and can be saved and eaten separately.)

Return the juice to the saucepan. Add the ginger ale; and return to the heat; when hot stir in the corn starch dissolved in water. Continue stirring until it comes to a boil; reduce heat. Serve in small cups; garnish with orange peel. [I used a vegetable peeler to remove some zest from an orange in long wide strips, I removed any pith, and then julienned the zest into long narrow strips.]

Adapted from “Hot Drinks for the Holiday Season”, Good Housekeeping, December 1911

100-Year-Old Peanut Cookie Recipe

16-year-old Helena Muffly wrote exactly 100 years ago today:

Saturday, December 2, 1911: Saturdays are so cut and dried, when no one comes to see you, especially when one is having a short vacation. I made some cookies this afternoon, the first time I really did it alone. They got rather hard on account of having too much flour in them. Anyway they proved to be eatable.

Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:

I wonder what kind of cookies Grandma made. A small cookbook published in 1911 to advertise KC Baking Powder contained this recipe for Peanut Cookies:

Peanut Cookies

1/4 cup butter

1/2 cup sugar

1 egg

2 tablespoonsful milk

1/4 teaspoonful salt

1 cup flour

1 level teaspoonful KC Baking Powder [other brands work fine]

3/4 cup shelled peanuts

Sift together, three times, the flour, salt and baking powder. Cream the butter; add sugar, egg, milk, the flour mixture, and lastly, the peanuts, chopped and pounded fine in a mortar. Drop on a buttered tin, a teaspoonful in a place. Put half a nut meat on each bit of dough. Bake in a moderate oven.

These cookies are excellent with a delightful peanut taste. I plan to make them again when I do my holiday baking.

For this recipe I used a 375 degree oven. I dropped the batter on a greased cookie sheet, and baked the cookies until lightly browned (about 10 minutes).

I did not sift the flour and other dry ingredients. And, instead of using a mortar to pound the nuts–whew, cooking sounds like more work in the days before electric appliances–, I ground them in a blender.

How to Make Popcorn in a Frying Pan

16-year-old Helena Muffly wrote exactly 100 years ago today:

Saturday, November 25, 1911: Just exactly one month yet. I must begin to be good and oh so nice. I was terrible busy this forenoon. This afternoon I studied a bit and popped some popcorn. My first attempt resulted in half or about a third of the contents jumping out of the pan, but the next time I was more successful.

Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:

Hmm, I wonder how the popping corn managed to jump out of the pan. People used to pop corn in a heavy frying pan, but they generally put a cover on the pan.

To make popcorn heat vegetable oil in a heavy frying pan until it is hot. Use a medium heat or flame.

Put some popcorn in the pan. (Use about 1/3 cup for an average sized pan.) Cover pan.

Hold about ½ inch above the burner and shake the pan. You don’t need to shake it rapidly; it’s okay to shake the pan relatively slowly.

Shake until the corn stops popping, and then remove from the heat and open lid.

1911 Thanksgiving Vegetable Centerpieces

16-year-old Helena Muffly wrote exactly 100 years ago today:

Saturday, November 18, 1911: Didn’t so much of anything today, except to be exceedingly lazy.

Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:

Maybe Grandma spent a quiet Saturday reading magazines. The November 1911 issue of Ladies Home Journal had some great pictures of Thanksgiving vegetable centerpieces.

DSC04980.crop — Centerpiece made with squash, carrots, celery with leaves, tomatoes, parsley, cranberries, and evergreen cuttings

DSC04979.crop — Centerpiece made with carrots, cranberries, potatoes, onions with brown skin partially removed, and candles

DSC04982.crop — Centerpiece made with onions with brown skin removed, popcorn, parsley, and candles

DSC04988.crop — Centerpiece made with pumpkin, carrots, tomatoes, evergreen cuttings, and candles

Hubbard Squash Soup Recipe

16-year-old Helena Muffly wrote exactly 100 years ago today:

Thursday, November 16, 1911: Nothing important.

Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:

Since Grandma didn’t write much a hundred years ago today I’m going to go off on a tangent –

My husband and I recently were out in the country and saw a farmer selling pumpkins, squash and other produce from a far. There were two large hubbard squash on the wagon. I immediately knew that I had to have one of them.

The farmer was surprised when I purchased it. He said that few people bought hubbard squash anymore. He said that the previous year he’d sold none—and my purchase was his first hubbard squash sale this year.

He continued, “Old people buy them once in a while. Young people think they are some type of big gourd.”

(I hope he wasn’t insinuating that I’m old. Middle aged: yes; old: no)

Are hubbard squash really an almost archaic food? . . .a food from Grandma’s day that people seldom eat now?

Here’s my favorite hubbard squash recipe. It’s probably not a hundred-year-old recipe—but it’s a good way to use an old-time squash.

This soup is excellent, and I make it several times every Fall.

Hubbard Squash Soup

3 cups hubbard squash pulp (approx. 1/2 hubbard squash)

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 large onion, diced

6 cloves garlic, finely diced

2 stalks celery, chopped

5 cups chicken broth

2 ham hocks

1 tablespoons honey

3/4 teaspoon thyme

2 cups heavy cream

2 cups milk

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. To get squash pulp, cut hubbard squash in half; remove seeds and membranes. Unless the squash is very small, only 1/2 of squash (or even less) will be needed to get 3 cups of pulp. [An aside: The squash in the photo is very large–and I needed to use less than a quarter of it to get 3 cups]. Put squash on a cookie sheet, cut side up. Bake the squash for 45-60 minutes or until tender. The squash meat will start to become dark. This is okay. Scrape squash out of the shell, and measure 3 cups of squash for use in this recipe.

Put olive oil in large pot. Heat using medium heat and then add celery, onion, and garlic; cook until tender. Add chicken broth, squash, ham hocks, honey, and thyme. Simmer for 45 minutes. Pull the ham hock out and dice any meat. Return meat to soup; cool slightly Puree soup in a blender until smooth. Return to pan, and add cream and milk. Reheat soup, then serve.

Yield: 9 servings

Old Cocoa Fudge Recipe

16-year-old Helena Muffly wrote exactly 100 years ago today:

Friday, November 10, 1911: Must begin to study harder if I ever want to graduate. Teacher gave out our reports and also gave quite a lecture about our marks also this afternoon. Ruthie expected a friend this evening and made chocolate fudge, but she didn’t come but the fudge however was not wasted.

DSC04954.crop — Cocoa Fudge with Black Walnuts

Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:

Rough day at school!–Good thing Grandma’s sister Ruth made fudge! Chocolate is a wonderful comfort food. 🙂

I found an excellent central Pennsylvania fudge recipe that is more than 100 years old in the Lycoming Valley Cook Book by the Ladies of Trout Run M.E. Church (1907).*

Cocoa Fudge

One-fourth cup of milk, one and one-half tablespoonfuls butter, one and one-fourth cups powdered sugar, nine tablespoonsful cocoa, a pinch of salt, one-half teaspoonful vanilla. Put the butter and milk in a sauce-pan, and when the butter has melted, add the sugar, cocoa and salt. Stir until dissolved, then cook, stirring occasionally, until it strings, which will be about eight minutes. Remove from stove, set in a pan of cold water, add the vanilla, then beat gently. The instant it begins to thicken, pour into a buttered pan. When hard, cut in squares. Great care must be taken not to beat it much, because, if beaten too thick, it cannot be poured into the pan.

Grace Harbor, Trout Run, Pa.

I stirred black walnuts—see yesterday’s post— into some of the fudge before I put it in the pan. The resulting fudge was awesome and brought back memories of fudge I ate many years ago when I was a small child.

Black walnuts have a wonderfully intense flavor that co-mingled beautifully with the rich cocoa flavor in the fudge.

My Cook’s Notes About How I Interpreted the Recipe:

I assumed that “strings” meant ,when I lifted my stirring spoon above the pan and then tipped it so that the chocolate mixture could flow back into the pan, that a “string” of chocolate went from the spoon to the pan. It did not take 8 minutes for the mixture to reach this stage—it probably was more like 5 minutes.

The mixture started to thicken only a few seconds after I set the sauce pan in cold water and began to stir.

After the fudge hardened, I had a little difficult getting it out of the pan, so I set the pan in hot water for a couple minutes. It when came right out and was easy to cut into squares.

I was surprised how little fudge this recipe made. I put it in a small 5 inch by 5 inch casserole dish that I usually use for left-overs. Families were larger a hundred years ago than they are now—so I would have thought that the recipe would make a large quantity rather than a tiny amount. Maybe cooks typically tripled or quadrupled the recipe.

Last spring I did another post on old fudge recipes—one even used molasses as in ingredient. Click her to see 1911 Chocolate Fudge Recipes.

* I got the recipe out of a 1992 reprint of the 1907 book. Kwik-Kopy Printing, Williamsport PA published the reprint.