About Toffee
All Natural Organic Gourmet Toffee
For those interested, we have compiled some information so that you can appreciate whoever the genius was that experimented with
sugar, butter and water. We also included a couple recipes in case you feel the urge to satisfy your sweet tooth on your
own.
HAVE A SWEET DAY!!!!!!!!
According to the Oxford English
Dictionary, toffee ("a sweet meat made from sugar or treacle, butter, and sometimes a little flour, boiled together; often mixed with bruised nuts such as almond or walnut toffee") was first mentioned in print in 1825. We know that most words are typically used long before they appear in print form.
Toffee...the modern British name for a sweet formerly called 'taffy.' The older name survives in the USA, but British toffee and American taffy are not quite the same....Welsh forms of toffee (variously called taffi, ffani, or cyflaith) are much more like American taffy. In particular, they are usually pulled, as is most American taffy. The agreeable custom of taffy-pulling parties has survived up to modern times in parts of Wales, while it is probably extinct in England.
Toffee became popular around 1800, a time when sugar and treacle (a sugar syrup like molasses) had become cheap. Early references to toffee all come from the north of England and often mention friends getting together to boil treacle with flour to make a sticky treat. Improvements to the basic mixture included adding cream, a
specialty of Devonshire, or butter to make a richly flavored confection. Buttery toffee is often called butterscotch, which suggests it was invented in Scotland. But the word was first recorded in the Yorkshire town of Doncaster, where Samuel Parkinson began making it in 1817. Possibly the "scotch" part of its name derives from "scorch" rather than from Scotland. As for the word "toffee," an early spelling is "toughy" or "tuffy," probably a reference to the confection's teeth-sticking
toughness.
If you would like to learn more about toffee, we recommend "A Later Developer: Toffee,"
Sugar-Plums and Sherbet: The Prehistory of Sweets,
by Laura Mason.
Recipes
In 19th century American and British cookbooks, the names toffee and taffy appear to be used interchangeably to denote similar recipes. This confection also sometimes masked as "molasses candy" or "pulled molasses candy." Some of these recipes instruct the cook to "pull" the candy, others simply to cut it in small squares. Some refer specifically to "Everton Toffie," named for a town near Liverpool, England. The oldest recipe for "taffy" we have comes from an American cookbook published in
1847.
Here are a few recipes from back in the day that still hold their own. The only difference is that you don't have to start a fire, so have fun and enjoy!!!!
Molasses Candy (Taffy)
Put a pint of common molasses in a stewpan, over a slow fire, let it boil, stir it to prevent its running over the top, or if necessary, take it off; when it has boiled more than half an hour try it, by taking some in a saucer; when cold, if it is brittle and hard, it is done; flavor with lemon, sassafras, or vanilla, and pour it quarter or half an inch deep in buttered tin pans. Shelled peanuts, (ground nuts) or almonds may be stirred into it, enough to make it thick, or but a few. Molasses candy may be made a light color by pulling it in your hands, having first rubbed them over with a bit of butter, to prevent the candy sticking to them, during the
process.
- Mrs. Crowen's American Lady's Cookery Book, Mrs. T. J. Crowen
Taffy
3 lb. sugar
1 pint water
1/2 tsp. citric acid
Juice of 3 lemons or 4 oranges
Butter (for pans)
Three pounds of sugar dissolved in a pint of water, in which half a teaspoon of citric acid has been dissolved; remove the scum as fast as it rises. Boil until it will crack when dropped in cold water; remove from the fire, and add the juice of three lemons or four oranges. Mix it well and boil very gently, until it is as hard as before the lemon was added; pour it in square buttered pans. It should be about an eighth of an inch thick when cold. Before it hardens mark it off neatly in small blocks that it may break regularly.
- Civil War Cooking: The Housekeeper's Encyclopedia, Mrs. E. F. Haskell, 1861.
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