Molasses Drops

Size: 4 ounces in a 3x6" bag

Sugar, Corn Syrup and Molasses.

From Susan’s Award-Winning Book “Sweet as Sin”

 Throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, molasses was one of America’s most conflicted foods whose identity was shaped by whoever was eating it. It appeared in desserts, candy, biscuits and gingerbread, made hot and delicious in rural kitchens throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was also a cheap, unwelcome substitute for nourishing foods, for slaves, prisoners, and the poor.

African Americans of the south, including those working in Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello before and after the Civil War, lived on bread, molasses and fat,[i] a diet that left them malnourished. Prisoners, who ate it as a steady diet, loathed it to the point that several prisoners, according to an article in a 1908 Topeka newspaper, went on strike, refusing to go to the “rock pile” with only bread and molasses for breakfast. These prisoners were then served bread and water each morning until they “gratefully returned” to molasses.[ii]

Later, in 1912, one Congressman underscored the desperate lives of strikers in Lawrence Massachusetts, saying: “It has been testified that these striking people have to put molasses on their bread because their wages are not sufficient to purchase butter.”[iii]

If molasses was controversial as a food, it was most definitely enjoyed as a candy. One of the early, pre-Civil War favorites was molasses pulls, among the few luxuries that enslaved people enjoyed on the plantations. In an interview with former slaves through the Depression era Federal Writer’s Project, Josephine Hamilton, who was enslaved in Arkansas, recounted: “At Christmas time, we had…cake, molasses candy that you pulled, horse apples that was good, better ‘n any apples we get these days.”[iv]

Lucky Civil War soldiers may have received pulled molasses in packages from home and definitely pulled the molasses themselves. Early on, confederate soldier John S. Jackman, wrote in his diary: “Pleasant day for winter. We are living well. Have good fresh beef, good pork, flour, sorghum, rice and so on, issued in abundance. We make the molasses into candy, have candy-pullings among ourselves.”

The pull soldiers and enslaved people mentioned were like taffy. On the battlefield and plantation, they may have flavored them with whatever was available, as the early molasses was bitter. In the confectionery, with the addition of vanilla, sugar, or spice, the pulls were literally pulled by hand or pulled from a hook. The book The Art of Confection, written by J.E. Tilton in 1865, reveals other molasses treats still with today:

“Candy of various kinds is made from molasses, such as stick molasses candy, pulled candy, taffy…The sticks may be single, twisted, braided flattened. Almonds, peanuts, hickory-nuts, &c, are often stirred into molasses candy which is also flavored with different essences, according to taste,” [v]

The late 1800s ushered in a new phenomenon to the candy world: the pull party. At these parties, young, European American couples, well-dressed and well-to-do, would pull the candy with lightly buttered fingers. The activity was recommended many years later, in 1964, in Boys Life, a magazine for boy scouts. The author has a beautiful description:

“It was great fun to watch the bubbling pan of hot liquid and to taste it when it was “tested” in a cup of cold water. The most fun, though, was pulling it. As you worked air into the candy it became lighter and lighter. When it cooled, the pulling became harder and harder. Soon it was a thick twisted rope that could be broken into bite-size pieces to hold in the back of your mouth or under your tongue as it melted.”[vi]

The molasses pull is also known as the molasses “taffy” or “toffee.” Many toffees today are still made with molasses and nuts, as described in the Civil War-era recipe. The toffee may have originated in England, where a favorite was the Everton  Toffee  made in the late 1700s.[vii] The words “taffy” and “toffee” are often intertwined, so the difference is this: toffee is harder and chewier, typically with nuts. The American toffee took off in the early 1900s through Prohibition, with such delicious molasses treasures as the Mary Jane and the Squirrel Nut Zipper, the style of candy Tilton was referring to in 1865.

By the 1940s, with machinery and industrial production a given, new candies were popping up everywhere, with colors and smells that defy the imagination. Oddly, a popular new molasses candy was straight forward and simple: the sponge candy, also known as sea foam. You’re likely to sample these crunchy bits in such places as upstate New York, Vermont and Massachusetts, but only from October to around February because of its sensitivity to humidity.

There’s the naked version which looks like molten chunks of brick of various sizes, with a bubbly center. The texture is amazing: they melt in your mouth, shrinking down to a mere reminder of their original size in seconds. Other versions are bite-sized and enrobed in chocolate. The texture inside looks almost like honey-comb, crisp, yellow and ribbed, and a delicious contrast to the smooth, chocolate texture outside.

[i] Deborah Jean Warner, “Sweet Stuff,” p. 33

[ii] “Prisoners refuse to go on rock pile on bread and ‘yup,” Topeka Daily Capital, October 13, 1908, p. 3.

[iii] Washington Times,  “Witnesses Describing Striking Conditions in Lawernce,” March 7, 1912, p. 1

[iv] Slave Narratives,  A Foilk History of of Slavery  in the United States with Interviews with Former Slaves, (Library of Congress, Work Projects Administration) p. 133 and 136

[v] Janet Clarkson, The Food History Almanac: Over 1,300 Years of World Culinary History, Culture, and Social Influence, (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), p.1247.

[vi] Billie Spencer, “An Old-Fashion Taffy Pull,” Boys’ Life magazine,July 1964,p. 63.

[vii] Laura Mason, Toffee, in The Oxford Companion to Sugars and Sweets, ed. Darra Goldstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 738.