Lollipop Apples (A.K.A. Toffee Apples): 1924

“Remember, remember, the 5th November: gunpowder, treason and plot” is about the only thing people recall from key stage 3 history lessons. Well, that and “Richard of York gave battle in vain”, which doesn’t really count now that I think of it.

Ask any child in year 8 around this time of year and they’ll tell you that bonfire night commemorates the date that Guy Fawkes – an aggrieved Catholic intent on overthrowing the anti-Catholic James I – was caught under the houses of parliament holding a lit match atop a mountain of gunpowder, practicing his best ‘wasn’t me, guv!’ expression. Luckily for the king, he was caught in the nick of time and marched off to the Tower of London to be, er, questioned.

It’s often the torture – sorry, questioning – part that’s the most memorable (for 12 year olds, at least.) All that stuff with the rack and deformed signatures on forced confessions just really seems to focus year 8’s. Illegal methodology aside, Guy Fawkes was found guilty of treason and sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered on 31st January 1606.

Guy Fawkes’ confession signature. The top was written straight after his torture and the second 8 days afterwards. Credit here.

The end.

Well… no. For a start, it wasn’t Guy Fawkes who came up with the plot to blow up the king and houses of parliament. That was the brainchild of Robert Catesby – an influential and wealthy man from a Catholic family who had watched his father and brother in law imprisoned for their faith.

Enraged by years of persecution (and perhaps harbouring a desire for more power), Catesby scouted out a band of like minded rebels and managed to rent out the cellar directly under the houses of parliament. Convenient, right? They spent the next few months gradually filling the space with 36 barrels of premium grade gunpowder and then waited patiently for the right time.

Of course, this situation raises questions about the competency of James’ security; for a notoriously paranoid king, it seems crazy to think that his guards didn’t perform regular checks on the contents of the cellars underneath the most important building in England.

Anyway, poor Guy Fawkes was given the job of lighting the fuse and then legging it like crazy to Europe, safe in the knowledge of a job well done. Meanwhile another plotter, Sir Everard Digby, was due to abduct the king’s daughter at the time of the explosion and install her as puppet queen who the Catholics could control. Unfortunately for Guy Fawkes et al, the plot was uncovered at the last minute and the plotters were exposed, eventually captured and executed.

But is that the truth?

As I said, it seems crazy to assume the government didn’t know about 36 barrels of gunpowder quietly festering just feet below the nobs and nobesses of the land (but not really the nobesses, thanks to a no ladies rule). And in fact, it’s just that: crazy. Sure, James I might not have known about it himself but there are strong arguments to suggest his first minister Robert Cecil did and was keeping a close eye. In fact, an anonymous letter warning one MP to stay away from parliament on the fated night ended up in the hands of Cecil as early as 26th October, yet he chose not to act straight away. Perhaps he was waiting for the plot to continue until he could gather enough evidence to be certain of executions or, for the cynical observer, to catch the plotters at the eleventh hour to make himself and the government appear even more heroic to the public.

And so we gather by every year to remember Guy Fawke’s ill-fated foray into arson by watching a human shaped sack of hay burn on a giant bonfire while children sit on their parents’ shoulders, whining for hot dogs and toffee apples.

Nice segue.

It was, wasn’t it?

The term ‘toffee’ traditionally just referred to boiled sugar rather than the creamy, individually wrapped sweets grandmas keep in their pockets. Toffee apples’ simplicity and cheapness makes them a decent money spinner for food vendors on bonfire night, but also a family friendly treat; children can replenish the ebbing sugar rush of Halloween, and parents can soothe their own guilt with the knowledge that somewhere underneath the sugar and syrup is a lump of fruit. The trouble with this bargain, of course, is that most kids throw their toffee apples away once the hard sugary layer has been nibbled off to reveal a disconcertingly mushy apple on a stick.

The idea of preserving fruit in syrup or sugar is as old as time; the ancient Egyptians used honey to preserve all manner of things from food to, er, dead bodies. Toffee apples, while not quite as old as ancient Egypt, made use of that great tradition in a cheap and useful way by ensuring that the final few apple harvests of late October wouldn’t go to waste.

The Oxford Companion to Food suggests the phrase ‘toffee apple’ first crops up in a food context when the BEF Times mentioned them in its 1917 Christmas edition. However, as author Alan Davidson points out, the invention of the 2 inch medium mortar, nicknamed ‘the toffee apple’ in 1915 suggests the sweet treat was already well established in Britain.

What about the recipes?

Popular theory suggests that candy apples (please note the careful wording there!) were the invention of American sweet manufacturer William Kolb who – like Isaac Newton himself – was struck by inspiration when an apple accidentally dropped into a vat of boiling sugar syrup. Okay, maybe not exactly like Isaac Newton. Regardless, Kolb immediately saw the potential to make cash and rot teeth and lo, the toffee apple was born.

Kolb’s invention may have come in 1908, but the first printed recipe for anything resembling a toffee apple wasn’t published until around 1919 (if you have an earlier one please let me know!) It appeared in American book Rigby’s Reliable Candy Teacher under the less crowd pleasing name ‘Apples on a stick’.

Take small apples and stick in each one at the top, a small wooden skewer, such as butchers use to pin roasts. Now cook a batch of Molasses Taffy to 280 degress F. Then dip the apple in the hot batch so as to cover it completely. Let the surplus syrup drip off, then stand them on a slab until cold.

Rigby’s Reliable Candy Teacher, W.O. Rigby, 1919.

A 1908 recipe for molasses taffy read thusly:

…for molasses taffy boil to the soft ball 1 quart of New Orleans molasses, 1 tablespoonful of granulated sugar. Now stir in 2 tablespoonfuls of vinegar, ¼ pound of butter, and boil until it becomes hard and brittle in cold water.  Just before removing from the fire stir in ¼ teaspoonful of soda dissolved in hot water and pull.

Household discoveries: an encyclopaedia of practical recipes and processes, Sidney Morse, 1908.

My attempt(s)…

First I began by making my molasses taffy – an American term for a chewy toffee. I scaled down the sizes and boiled molasses with sugar until it hit 116 degrees Celsius: soft ball stage. Once that had been achieved I threw in some vinegar and butter and boiled it to 146 degrees Celsius: hard crack stage. Then, I dipped a green apple into the mixture and coated it well.

The apples looked impressively sleek and dark. True, they did also look a little like the poisoned apple in Snow White – kind of black and oozing – but even so, still quite magnificent.

You can keep any comparisons between me and the witch to yourself.

Unfortunately though they didn’t taste or feel anything like what I thought of when I thought of toffee apples. I had wanted a satisfying crack to the shell but these were still slightly chewy (though I think that was down to my dodgy thermometer reading.) I’d also hoped for a sweet tangy flavour, whereas these were decidedly more bitter in a treacly kind of way.

So I tried again, this time with a recipe from 1924 for ‘Lollipop Apples‘.

Select very small red apples, wash and dry them, put a stick or skewer in each, and dip them in the glace.
[To make glace] 1 pound sugar, 1/8 pound cream of tartar, 2/3 cupful water. Place all the ingredients in a small saucepan, stir only until the sugar has dissolved, then cook to 320 degrees.

Mrs. Allen on Cooking, Menus, Service, Ida C. Baley Allen, 1924.

This was more like it. I selected the reddest apples I could find and once my sugar had reached the hard crack stage, dipped the fruit in carefully.

They certainly looked the part as I hung them from a tray to harden: red, glossy, and with a very satisfying tap when I knocked my knuckle against one. They tasted much better too, exactly as I remembered them from my childhood: first a sugary, caramelised sweetness as I bit into the shell and then a slightly sour type of sweetness from the apple. Unlike my childhood self, though, I found I actually wanted to finish my apple even after the sugar had been eaten. Hooray for personal growth!

I know that this year’s bonfire night is different to the bonfire night we might have hoped for but for those of us staying in tonight, I recommend giving these a go; they were truly delicious and comfortingly nostalgic. And hey, maybe if enough of us make them then next year when I ask year 8 what they know about bonfire night they’ll surprise me with a comprehensive historiography of toffee apples instead of the usual!

E x

Lollipop Apples

450g granulated sugar
56g cream of tartar
155 ml water
4-6 apples

  1. Place the sugar, cream of tartar and water in a pan and heat until it is boiling. Swill, don’t stir the pan.
  2. While the sugar is melting, skewer the apples from top to bottom with wooden skewers. Make sure the skewer goes through the full length of the apple.
  3. When the temperature reaches 146 degrees C, turn the heat off.
  4. Quickly dip the apples, one at a time, into the sugar until they are evenly coated all over.
  5. Place the apples on greaseproof paper and allow to harden for several minutes.

Apple Pandowdy: 1869

It’s very hard to sum up America in the 19th century. Every day I lament to myself: why, oh why, can’t America in the 19th century be summed up more easily? But that’s just the way it is.

Where were its skyscrapers, malls and subways? Its millions of tourists flocking to see shows on Broadway and the sights of the Grand Canyon? Where were its property tycoons rigging up chains of luxury hotels before inexplicably becoming president? And, for the love of God, just what was going on with the flag?! (There were over 20 incarnations of it during the 19th century alone as more and more states were admitted to the Union.)

From the 1810 census we are told there were just over 7 million people living in America, with most of them listed as living in the Northern and Southern Eastern states such as New York and South Carolina. However, it’s best not to take everything the 1810 census says at face value; until 1830 there was no standardised method of acquiring and presenting information, some states’ census returns got lost or altered over the years and, pretty crucially, it didn’t take into account the hundreds of thousands of Native Americans who lived in the Great Plains to the West. It’s also pretty inaccurate in that it categorises the free white settlers into groups (males under the age of ten, females aged 26-44 etc), but then allowed slave owners to record a single lump sum for the number of slaves they owned, so detailed records of the demographics of an entire 1.5 million people are absent.

Flawed as it was, the 1810 census did provide some context to how much America changed in the 100 years of the 19th century to become more like the America we know today. As the 1890 census attests, the population (including Native Americans this time) had increased to just under 63 million and because slavery had been abolished in 1865, no slaves are listed either. That didn’t mean the problems of slavery had vanished; the reconstruction of the south following the American Civil War (1861-1865) had been messy and many ex-slaves found their lives had changed not a jot and in some cases worsened as they were left to fend for themselves in communities that made it clear they were still slaves in all but name, despite the then President Ulysses S. Grant’s attempts at promoting civil rights.

Ulysses S Grant, American president 1869 – 1877. Also half alien, apparently.

Who were the Americans?

As well as political changes, the people of America were changing their perceptions of what it meant to be American. Was it that you had to have been born in the country, or was ‘American’ a state of mind? This was the century to find out.

In the first half of the 19th century there were some very dull land exchanges which men with big beards sitting in wood panelled rooms tend to get very excited about, but your average 15 year old always switches off for when it comes round to that part of the GCSE course. Essentially, in 1803, the Americans experienced their first major foray into capitalism when they bought 827,000 square miles of land west of the Mississippi River off the French for $15 million. The Louisiana Purchase practically doubled the size of America but the problem was the Americans didn’t quite know what to do with all this land. In 1819, one particularly excited beardy man called Major Stephen Long was sent on a mission to explore the lands west of the Mississippi River and came back to tell the government that, in a spectacular example of ‘Buyer Beware’, the lands the government had paid so much for were:

“…wholly unfit for cultivation and farmers cannot hope to live on this land. Occasionally there are large areas of fertile land but the shortage of wood and water will mean settling in the country is impossible.”

Major Long, 1819

Yikes. So inhospitable and barren did the American people believe the West to be that they called the Great Plains the ‘Great American Desert’ (thereby proving that the American talent for self promotion has grown over time, or at the very least that PR and advertising has changed dramatically.)

The government tried to promote the idea of moving westwards for expansion as much as it could until in 1845 John L O’Sullivan, founder of the United States Magazine and Democratic Review coined the term ‘Manifest Destiny’. He argued that since God had given Americans all this land, they had a duty – nay, a destiny – to take it, cultivate it and control it. Never mind that there were already people living on the Great Plains, the government said. Were they white? No? Christian? No? They didn’t count. This slant was very popular, (and helped by the discovery of gold in 1849), and from the 1840’s onwards America’s population boomed as migrants from the East and immigrants from other countries flocked West to take their share of the land and its resources.

Conflict and tension between settlers and the Native Americans of the Great Plains increased sharply in the 1860’s as more and more Native Americans fought against the settlers for the land they had lived on for generations. Stories of brutality were common on both sides, although it’s worth remembering that one of those sides was made up of people with non mechanical weapons and the other side was made up of organised armies backed up with guns and profoundly racist passions: “…It is right and honorable to use any means under God’s heaven to kill Indians. … Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice.” John Chivington, a pastor-turned-colonel (yes, really), said in 1864 before the Sand Creek Massacre.

Ironically, there was now a sense that the land, which had seemed too enormous and unending only a few decades ago, was suddenly at risk of overcrowding and of natural resources drying up. As settlers fought to take over the land and Native Americans fought to stop them, it might seem to some that this was a fight about more than just space; this was a fight about national identity and ideals. By the 1890’s it seemed that being a true American meant having a fighting spirit, a devotion to God and a belief that the right thing to do was to make use of all the resources available in order to better oneself, whatever the cost. That doesn’t mean that all people of the 1890’s were heartless, not at all. Just that they mostly operated, as with everyone else, within the parameters of their time and society.

Are you going to talk about food soon?

That’s a pretty long and surprisingly impassioned preamble to what is essentially a recipe for dry apple crumble, sorry. I’m struggling not having a class in front of me so you, poor reader, have become a bit of a stand in – I hope you were taking notes, there will be a test.

The reason for that not very relevant history is that for 19th century America, a recipe wasn’t just a chance to show off wealth or skill. It was often a mark of who you were – what your brand was. At a time when people were making the most of the new opportunities available to them and fighting for a sense of identity and belonging, no one published anything, not even cookbooks, without wanting to say something bigger about themselves than just ‘I make a good pound cake.’

The recipe for Apple Pandowdy comes from Mrs. Winslow’s Domestic Recipt Book for 1869 and although the origin of the word ‘pandowdy’ isn’t clear, some historians believe it came about because of the dish’s appearance as being a bit boring, or ‘dowdy’, and having been baked in a pan.

For Charlotte Winslow, the 1800’s were the perfect opportunity to make her fame and fortune. A paedriatric nurse, she rose to prominence in the 1840’s as the face of Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup – a cure all for ‘fussy babies’ that was manufactured by her son in law and his partner for sale in America and Britain. Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup was sold as a remedy for babies who were teething or had dysentery, because obviously those two things are very similar. It was hugely popular and in 1868, more than 1.5 million bottles were sold. The secret? Morphine.

“Would baby like his syrup inhaled or injected?”

One teaspoon had enough morphine in it to kill the average child. Just to make sure that non-average, already morphine-addicted children didn’t miss out, it also contained alcohol. Unsurprisingly, parents began to notice the adverse affects (to put it mildly) of giving the syrup to their children and the medicine quickly gained the nickname ‘Baby Killer.’ Despite this sales continued to do well and it wasn’t until 1906 that morphine was removed from the ingredient list (although the alcohol remained) and 1930 when it was finally removed from the market completely.

Domestic Recipt Book for 1869 proudly advertised itself as a book, or pamphlet, which could help women cook meals for their families as well as cure them with home made treatments. If the remedies inside the pages couldn’t help, then the adverts on the front of the book for Mrs. Winslow’s ready-made cough and cold remedies could be purchased at nearby pharmacies (or maybe street corners, given the contents of such treatments.)

What better recipe book to cook a meal for my family – including a young child – than from the manufacturer of the ‘Baby Killer’ herself?

It was a surprisingly easy recipe to follow and only used five basic ingredients. (Un?)Fortunately none of them was morphine.

First, I sliced three apples and laid a layer of them in a buttered dish. On top of this I scattered a tablespoon of brown sugar and a couple of tablespoons of breadcrumbs, sprinkled on a pinch of lemon zest and dotted some blobs of cold butter on top. I then repeated the process another two times until I had almost reached the top of the dish and the whole thing looked very ‘dowdy’ indeedy.

Mrs. Winslow added to the bottom of her recipe a note stating that “a little cider improves this very much” which was unnerving because a) she was basically telling me that this wasn’t worth eating without alcohol and b) given the proliferation of alcohol in her medicines I wasn’t sure what counted as ‘a little’ by her measurements. Also c) we didn’t have any in. We did have boring old apple juice, though, so I tipped 1/2 a cup full in. No baby killers here, thank you very much.

It baked for just over 30 minutes until the apple slices were soft enough to pierce with a fork and then I served it with some ice cream (which actually wasn’t anachronistic at all given that the first hand cranked ice cream freezers were introduced to America in the 1840’s.)

I don’t think I need to tell you that it was pretty dry. Perhaps my cup was too small, but it seemed as though I’d not added any liquid at all. I was thankful for the ice cream, which when melted into the dowdy made it much more like an apple crumble and less like slices of dehydrated apple under bits of toast. I also think that in my lockdown induced panic to make food last I’d been a bit stingy with my butter blobs, so that probably contributed to the dryness a bit too.

It smelled lovely, though, like sweet bread and other than the fact it sucked all the moisture out of my head it tasted pretty good too – faintly citrusy and not overly sweet. For an 1860’s family trying to save all the money they had in order to pay for the long journey westwards, it did a good job of acting like a sweet treat. Plus, it was handy for using up bread that had gone a bit stale and also didn’t need to use any eggs, like other recipes for stale bread did.

A recipe that used simple ingredients, was quick and easy to make and – bonus – didn’t kill any children: I think that’s as close to the American Dream as I could hope to achieve.

E x

Apple Pandowdy

3 large cooking apples
4 or 5 tablespoons of breadcrumbs
4 or 5 tablespoons of brown sugar
Grated lemon rind
Butter
150ml of apple juice or cider (or more if you want a bit of a sauce.)

  1. Peel and slice the applies thinly. Spread a layer of them into a buttered dish.
  2. Sprinkle some grated lemon rind onto the apples.
  3. Sprinkle over the apples a tablespoon and a half of brown sugar and a table spoon and a half of breadcrumbs.
  4. Dot five or six chunks of cold butter onto the breadcrumb and sugar.
  5. Repeat the whole process twice more.
  6. Bake in the oven at 190 degrees for 30 minutes or until the apples are soft.