Molasses candy (No. 1)
Stir together three cupfuls of New Orleans molasses and a cupful of brown sugar. Add a gill of vinegar and put all over the fire in a porcelain-lined saucepan. Bring slowly to a boil and stir the syrup often as it cooks. Test the candy, from time to time, by dropping a bit into iced water. As soon as this bit hardens stir into the boiling syrup a heaping teaspoonful of butter; when this melts, add a teaspoonful of baking-soda dissolved in a tablespoonful of boiling water, and remove immediately from the fire. Pour into buttered tins and cut into diamond-shaped candies, or pull into ropes.
This is the good old-fashioned molasses candy of “candy pulls”—the frolics dear to our mothers’ girlish days. In my opinion it is sweeter to taste and to memory than chocolate creams or any other modern bonbon.