Make Homemade Candy: 5 Recipes

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Candy Recipes:

• Mint Kisses
• Molasses Clove Taffy
• Wintergreen Bonbons (Fondant)
• Suckers
• Ribbon Candy 

• Helpful Tips: Candy Hints 

A gift of candy is an age-old way of expressing love or friendship, whether from a child offering to share his candy bar or a mother making fudge for a special family occasion. An especially sweet expression of sentiment is a gift of old-timey homemade candies flavored with herbs and spices. Remember root beer suckers, ginger hard candies, peppermint kisses, cinnamon gumdrops, and licorice whips? Let one of these old-fashioned favorites melt in your mouth, and you’ll imagine your grandmother’s smile.

Candy dates back at least 3000 years —we know that from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics—and some form of candymaking can be found in almost every culture. It was the Arabs, however, who first cultivated sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum), developed techniques of refining the sap, and made the first sugar-based confections that we know today as candy.

Candymaking was a part of family life in this country in the early eighteenth century; through the Depression and beyond, taffy pulls were a part of growing up. Herbs and spices such as nutmeg, cardamom, cinnamon, mint, clove, mace, and anise were highly prized for their flavor or medicinal value, so they were a natural choice for flavoring candies, which were also a delicacy. Early candymakers either grew their herbs and prepared extracts at home, or purchased them at the general store or from traveling medicine men who hawked their wares from wagons. By the end of World War II, when modern manufacturing techniques made candy readily available and cheap, many families had stopped making their own.

The pioneer candymakers made candy over an open fire in cast-iron or copper pots, usually without a candy thermometer to tell them when the sugar syrup had been cooked sufficiently. Instead, they used the cold water test, dropping a small quantity of boiling syrup into a bowl of cold water; its shape or consistency told them how close it was to being done. Today, a candy thermometer takes the guesswork out of judging when the syrup is done, but the cold water test can be used if you prefer or if you have no thermometer. The chart on page 76 relates the changes in consistency of the syrup to the temperatures at which they occur.

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