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Note to anyone who lives above 3500 ft above sea level: you will need to consult a candy-making chart and adjust for your exact altitude if you strictly use a thermometer, and not the cold water test. Your mixture will take longer to boil, and above 3500 ft, you can easily burn an entire pan of your candy mixture and still not reach the temperature written down in the recipe. You will need to adjust your temperatures, taking your mixture off of the stove at a lower thermometer temp, thanks to being at a higher altitude. Props to anyone in the Mountain Time Zone who has tried to follow a candy recipe and had to throw away a pan belching out black smoke.
My mom has a book of state fair blue ribbbon candy recipies from that area. Makes the best candy at altitude. Def an important thing for all candy makers and food canrs!
Having lived in the Ozarks for around 5 years. I noticed how different cooking was up there. How we had to adjust cook times and temps of many recipes.
A few years back now the BBC did a series where they put modern confectioners into Tudor, Georgian and Victorian time periods to make sweets the old fashioned way. The Sweet Makers was its title, and they covered the history of sugar at the same time. Was really interesting to watch the old techniques.
I searched within TH-cam, and I believe I found this BBC program. If you search "Tudor Sweet Makers", the video should be listed first. It's a little over 30 minutes long. Thanks for mentioning this program! 🙏🍬
For anybody as confused as I was when they heard "Olives A La Natural History" is the name of a food, I went and searched for you: apparently they were...literally olives that were cut and sculpted to look like things from nature such as animals, and as a bonus "Nut Cartoons" were basically just painted nuts to look like people or things...a bit like easter eggs but for halloween
Great video! 🎃 I have a "sticky kitchen" story: my (very culinary inclined) grandmother thought that she would try and make her own maple syrup... She tapped the backyard trees, got a couple gallons of sap, and put it on the stove to boil down. She was in the next room when she heard an explosion... There was sticky syrupy sap on the ceiling, the walls, the cupboards, the floor... 😳 It was an epic mess! It happened before I was born, but she told me the story several times. She said that she found syrup in odd places in the kitchen for years. 😆 So, moral of the story: like making candy for the first time, be careful if you ever try to make syrup.
Sounds as if your grandmother was using a pressure cooker to speed up the process and it blew. Fortunate for her that she was not in the room when it exploded, she might have been badly injured by the boiling liquid. Maple syrup is typically made outdoors because of the sheer volume of sap that must be boiled away to produce the viscous syrup. Depending upon the percent of sugar in the sap; it can take upwards of 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup! Imagine hauling all that sap into your kitchen. Also, the lengthy boiling process will create a great deal of steam (which can be sticky) and leave you with a mess in the kitchen. Commercial maple producers often use a reverse osmosis system initially to remove the bulk of the water before finishing off in the traditional metal pans. Using a wood fire imparts a subtle smoky flavor to the resultant syrup. In many parts of the Northeast and Canada, maple sugar season is a community affair and provides an opportunity for social interactions between families and friends.
My sticky kitchen moment involves making crabapple jelly. They don't tell you all the steam eventually cools and coates EVERYTHING, and resists clean up. I thought my mom was going to kill me
My best friend and I tried to make caramel when we were abt 12. We melted sugar in a pot on the stove, it turned brown and smelled good, so we poured it onto a piece of wax paper on her kitchen table. It hardened to the table and we couldn't lift it so she got a meat mallet and gave me a knife and we proceeded to beat and scrape off what we could. Needless to say, her parents were furious when they returned home and my father, who owns a furniture store, helped to replace the table. Moral of the story, hot melted sugar is carbon, not caramel
I love my grandma's stories about what Halloween used to be like. It was basically a children's version of The Purge. "Trick or Treat" is just a figure of speech now but back then it was an ultimatum
I pity any trick-or-treater that dares to knock upon Max Miller's door, lest they be subjected to a 20 minute lecture on the entire history of halloween before they are allowed to leave
yall really gonna tempt me to fly to California just so I can knock on his door and be subjected to a 20 minute lecture on the entire history of halloween
I was a child in the 60s before people started freaking out about homemade Halloween treats. My brother and I had a ranking system and the homemade stuff was #1- cookies, brownies, caramel apples, popcorn balls. I remember my mom making popcorn balls and Rice Krispie treats to give out. #2 was anything chocolate, #3 was caramels, Tootsie Rolls, taffy and all the chewy stuff, and the rock bottom was hard candy. Old ladies gave out Starlight mints.
in 1972, an old lady gave me a can of corn. She'd forgotten what night it was and had no candy. I was five and very confused when she handed the can to me.
@@leannsmarie I once got walnuts (in shell) because the elderly couple said they hadn't expected anybody. That would have been late eighties to early nineties
@@leannsmarie In '78 one old widower gave me a handful of cheese puffs. I think I may have been the only kid to knock on his door, because I had to explain trick-or-treating to him.
One older lady in grandma's neighborhood was low-key famous for giving out full size candy bars. I say low-key because that wasn't info one shared with everyone. It's been over 20 years but I bet I could still find the right house.
@@redwolfdarkmoon5326 looked online and a recipe from 1884 said its large oysters wrapped with thin cut bacon seasoned with salt and pepper, cooked on a pan till crisp and served on toast
Now I'm so nostalgic! I was 14 yrs old (74 now) my Dad & I made this from his hand written recipe (At 13 yrs He had to sneak ingredients to make it) Thank you for the treasured memory of my Dad & I.
I'm an absolute noodle for vinegar so I could see a world in which it's good. But cabbage candy? Absolutely not. At it's best, cabbage doesnt taste like anything. At it's worst, it tastes like farts.
I grew up eating green cabbage and peanut butter together. I know it sounds horrible, but it's great! Max, if you're reading this, give it a try, pretty please? Simply layer peanut butter onto a cabbage leaf, fold it over (sandwich style) for easy handling, and eat! Don't knock it til you try it, guys!
Oh my God, thank you! My grandma used to make this. We lived in a poor coal mining town in West Virginia, and she would make pounds of this with other foods for the miners. I have been wanting to try this candy again for decades, it was my favorite as a child.
Laura mentions going to a taffy pull in the Little House books. Taffy pulls were often courting events meant for young people to get to know each other and flirt. Sort of like a going to a dance or social. Teen boys and girls would be paired to pull the taffy and talk to each other for the 20 minutes or so it took to pull the taffy, and then continue socializing as they then ate the taffy together.
I have probably seen Meet Me in St. Louis more than half a dozen times in the last 4 decades. Of course, the scenes of Judy Garland singing in that movie are memorable and iconic ("Have Yourself a Merry Christmas"). But those chaotic Halloween scenes always hit me like a fever dream. The kids (little kids) almost seem demonic in how out of control they are- running wild, burning things, and playing horrible tricks on their neighbors. And now I know it was actually based on historic fact. LOL! Thanks, Max.
So glad you used the Fanny Farmer Boston school cookbook recipe. I remember making this exact recipe with my grandma. Her old fanny farmer cookbook from the 40's is one of my prized possessions.
My grandma was born in 1904 and she used to love to tell us kids about her childhood. They made all their own candy back when she was growing up - they didn't have much money and 9 kids to feed! It always sounded like another world to me, I was born in the 60's and we had all packaged store-bought candy.
I joined a Halloween costume contest when I was a kid that was hosted by my relatives. I came in dressed as Dracula. My parents would never let me check myself in the mirror cos according to them my make up looked scary enough to give me nightmares and apparently they were right cos I won the best costume award with my uncle emphasizing my scary makeup. The prize was a tub of ice cream with the flavor of my choice and a VHS tape with a horror movie of my choice. Fun times
@ghostdragon4164 - Every year, Provincetown on Cape Cod, has a parade with a theme for which many onlookers wear costumes. On year was "Myths & Legends". I bought a housecoat, fuzzy slippers, a hand mirror, a big tube of lipstick, along with a swim cap onto which I glued 100 toy snakes - I was "Medusa, primping". Although not technically on Halloween, later at the party at Town Hall, I won BEST COSTUME. My prize was a Cajun cookbook and CDs of a Cajun musical group to arrive by mail, though nothing ever came. So my win was a hollow victory. B^( But fun!
my aunt used to own a candy factory. When we'd go visit her, she'd take all the kids into the "Taffy Pulling Room" (mentioned as the cure for Mike TV in Willy Wonka) and we'd make the sticky kind Max makes here. Only we'd roll the wad of candy in powdered cinnamon or ginger or mint leaves while stretching and twisting it.
Also, I know I always bring up Laura Ingalls Wilder, but in her book, Farmer Boy, about her husband Almanzo's childhood in northern New York State, there is a good description of making candy like this. One of the characters says that usually it would be made in the wintertime, but the children in the book are unsupervised for a week in the summer while their parents are away, and make the candy anyway, and it won't harden. Theirs was brown because it was made with molasses.
Thank you for the memories! I am 63 and we use to make this candy at my church when I was a little girl. We made it not just at Halloween but at different parties during the cold months. It was called candy pulling parties. We had so much fun with a partner and you would always get tickled. Our candy was very vinegary and sometimes we added food dye. Those were such good times . Have a fun and safe 🎃 Halloween.
I've heard a lot of stories about the origins of Halloween but this is the first I've heard about the Scottish cabbage tradition. Thanks for teaching me about that, Max!
Same here, and I'm Agnostic Pagan. So I thought I've already heard many of the stories involving Samhain/Halloween. But I seem to learn something new with each episode. Thanks, Max and José!
@@TastingHistory I'd always heard that Halloween originated in Ireland (e.g., carving turnips into Jack O'Lanterns). On the other hand . . . there are people with my uncommon maiden surname who insist that our roots began in Scotland, whereas all my ancestors on one side insist that we originated in Ireland. One of the greater Scottish contingent and one of my aunts would do battle about this regularly. I didn't know about this until I met a guy at a company bowling league who shared my maiden name. Never heard of him before, and he wasn't part of my extended family. *He* was the one who'd done battle with my aunt over the years, and that was the first I'd ever heard of Scotland perhaps being involved. Go figure!
@@SputnikDeb There's so much cultural crossover between Scotland and Ireland that it would be really hard to pinpoint exactly where and when the traditions first popped up. Most likely it's just an amalgamation of various regional celebrations/traditions that organically spread out and adapted over time, much like how the US version of Halloween has changed from its origins. So it's likely that both sides of your family are right (or wrong, lol.)
I love the idea that our modern tradition of dressing kids up in Superman costumes and giving them candy has its roots in what basically sounds like the 19th century version of the Purge.
Wait till you learn exactly why Christmas was cancelled back in the day in England. Not only was it seen as "pagan" but it was basically an excuse for folks to fuck shit up. Of course, banning Christmas also led to riots in the streets so that backfired.
My father was looking after me when I was little and I read a Raggedy Ann and Andy book with one story called The Taffy Pull. It wasn't exactly a recipe but it gave us a rough idea of what we needed. Sugar, butter, and vinegar! It took two tries but we did actually make some taffy. I just sent him a link to this video. I think he'll get a kick out of it.
@@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721 Definitely. But I would advise it do be done only with an older child, or a child that listens well if young. Hot sugar burns are catastrophic, and you don't want a kid touching that sugar while it's cooking, or before it's cooled enough to start pulling safely
I was a child in the 1970s, and my sisters and I used to "pull" vinegar taffy sometimes. It's actually really good! We also had parties where we bobbed for apples, and the neighbors still gave out homemade treats when we trick-or-treated at their doors (although my mother made us say "Happy Halloween" instead of "trick-or-treat", because she thought it was more polite). This was a fun episode to watch and sent me on a sweet trip down nostalgia lane 😀😀😀 (Although it sounds like in earlier centuries, Halloween was more like "The Purge" for kids!)
this is making so many memories come forward, one year, about 3 years before my father died, he and my mama decided that instead of waiting for their great grand kids to come and trick or treat them, they got dressed up in costumes and went to the great grand kids'houses before they left for their trick or treating and trick or treated the kids....the great grand kids loved it, now those great grand kids are in their 30's and still remember when their gramma and grampa trick or treated them...my parents had a great sense of humor.
Popcorn balls were my Mother's Christmas treat. I figured her Mother having six children's during the depression was a reason as an inexpensive sweet , colorful treat. It was better with at least two people making the balls as hot and needed to work quickly with buttered hands.
I was the popcorn ball maker in our family. We lived way out in the country and didn't have any trick or treaters (or any neighbors to trick or treat from!) so they were all ours!
I made popcorn balls and molasses poof candy (which is what I thought the vinegar candy was going to be, see recipe below) from my grandma's old recipe cards when I was 12ish. My mom was trying to get me to learn to cook/follow a recipie better and told me we could make any recipe I found in her box, so my sweet tooth self went straight for the candies! So molasses poofs start like this with vinegar instead of water to dissolve the sugar and a bit of molasses (or honey if you perfer) for flavor, but then after you reach hard crack stage you dump in a tablespoon of baking soda and stir the whole thing, from the bottom for 10-15 seconds before you dump it into the pan, spread it flat, and leave it to cool until hard. Then you crack it up into pieces that would fit into your mouth and either eat it all right away or in a day or 2 tops if stored in an airtight container. You can also coat it in chocolate to make it last for a little longer, but any poof part exposed to air will melt from the humidity. Yes it's as messy as a volcano made the same way, yes, your pot needs to be twice the size you think you need. The smashing of the candy can be a bit of a problem in terms of shattered sugar dust all over the place. I got the wise idea to use a muffin tin layered with choco chips to make smaller pieces, but that did not go according to plan...
Pro tip: you can use a pastry brush dipped in water to GENTLY brush the sides of the pan to dissolve any sugar crystals that may be clinging to the sides. They act kind of like seeds and can cause a chain reaction of crystallization and ruin your candy.
@mattwilson8298 - That is also a good tip to use when making invert sugar HOWEVER if you put string or wooden sticks into the syrup and CAUSE a run-away chain reaction, you end with yet another old-fashioned sugary treat, rock candy.
When I went to culinary trade school in HS my Principal's family ran a candy shop locally from the early 1900's. He showed us many things his family had made for a variety of holidays over the century. These types of candies still amaze me. And, I blew a whole lot of money on a marble slab just to make candy canes for my kids from scratch every year.
My brother and his family lived in a town that was the HQ of a huge, well-known, international candy company. His kids' school Halloween (and other holidays) parties and other local Halloween activities used to get absolutely deluged with candy the company donated.
When my grandma passed i got a bunch of her old recipes & cookbooks. She had this old, old recipe for a ‘Vinegar Pie’. Essentially a sugar Creme pie with a healthy addition of white vinegar. I’ve never been brave enough to try it but just the idea of a vinegar pie lives in my brain rent-free
My Grandmother used to make my Dad vinegar pie. He loved it and wanted me to find a recipe. I haven't quite gotten it right yet but the search continues. It's very good tbh.
As part Irish American and a huge fan of Halloween, I Thank you for bringing the origin story of the holiday because it came from both Scotland and Ireland Gaelic countries.
Really? I knew a few people from Scotland when I lived in Canada. They wouldn’t allow their kids to go out ‘begging for candy’. If it had only been 1 family I probably wouldn’t have noticed
The vinegar is for texture rather than flavor, preventing crystallization by breaking some of the sucrose bonds into glucose and fructose. The glucose and fructose prevent the build up of sucrose, stopping crystallization and also resulting in a more uniform-textured candy. Cream of tartar is another acid that is very commonly added to taffies for the same purpose.
I found the recipe online: Ingredients 1/2 cup shortening 1-1/4 cups sugar 2 eggs 1 cup hot water 1/2 cup cocoa 1-1/2 cups sifted Gold Medal "Kitchen-tested" flour 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon baking soda 1 teaspoon baking powder 1 teaspoon vanilla 1 egg white 3/4 cup sugar 1/8 teaspoon cream of tartar 3 tablespoons water 1/2 teaspoon vanilla (or other flavoring) Instructions Cream shortening, add sugar gradually, and cream until fluffy. Blend in well-beaten eggs. Slowly add hot water to cocoa and mix until smooth. Stir to dissolve completely. Sift flour, salt, soda, and baking powder together, and add to creamed mixture alternately with hot water and cocoa mixture. Blend in vanilla. Pour into an 8-inch square pan (2-1/2 inches deep) which has been greased and lined with paper. Bake 50 to 55 minutes in a moderate oven (350 F). Now for the frosting: Combine in top of a double boiler the egg white, sugar, cream of tartar, and water, and beat together just enough to completely blend ingredients. Place over rapidly boiling water, and beat with rotary beater until mixture is white and very light. (Icing is done when it barely holds its shape and is not runny as the beater is pulled out.) This takes 5 to 7 minutes depending on the size of boiler and vigor of beating. Remove from over hot water, and do not beat any more. Fold in the flavoring. Spread on the cake.
That looked a lot like a devil's food type Black Midnight Cake my mother used to make, originally from a Betty Crocker cookbook. She iced it with a slightly fluffy meringue type White Mountain Frosting also from Betty Crocker, which looked a lot like what the version shown in the video was using.
Omg i never knew that history of Halloween. We immigrated from the Netherlands in 58. The neighbours in the apartment complex initiated us kids into going trick or treating. We were shocked, going and knocking on strangers doors and demanding candy while wearing a costume? How strange, how exciting. The last few years we lived in a neighbourhood with a lot of new immigrants too and it was obvious that they felt the same way.
Well when you ban allthe Catholic holidays you need some sort of ruse to keep diong them. In Scotland we revived old pagan stuff. In the Nederlands you got Bla....
As a Child in the 60s I was taken to the Halloween parade in Hiawatha. I did not realize that it went back so far, but for my Dad it was a memory of His youth.
One time my sister had to proctor a test on Halloween (not her decision) and she felt so bad about it she made candy corn for everyone. Two batches, one with vegan butter for that crowd. She makes Really good candy corn
Seconding the switchel - one of its nicknames is "Haymaker's Punch," so I'm guessing your grandmother's was similar. It can contain helpful stuff like electrolyes for people with labor-intense jobs (like bailing hay). It's quite tasty!
I’m over 70, my mother and my aunts made vinegar candy as treats a few times a year with us kids involved in the folding and kneading “taffy pull”. I thought it was a French-Canadian thing like the Barley Candy lollipops the nuns would make. To me both were delicious but, what did we know in the 1950s?
Hehe, yeah, I thought it was a Swedish thing 😛 We have a peppermint version here, very similar to candy canes. And Brazil apparently has a coconut version 😄
I grew up in a town in northeast New Jersey in the 1970s, and we always called the night before Halloween "Cabbage Night". It was the night when kids threw toilet paper at houses, etc., but was always pretty tame. It seemed we were the only town whose kids (and adults) called it "Cabbage Night". We never knew why but always wondered how it got that strange name, and now I know. Thank you!
Yeah, I grew up in north-central NJ (Morris County), and it was always Mischief Night. Never heard of Cabbage Night. It was mostly TP-ing, soaping windows, and (from the "bad" kids) egging houses.
My mom taught me how to use the candy thermometer leading into the holidays of my preteens. We got pretty handy at making what we wanted from each stage. I highly recommend for parents because it really helped instill a deep love and appreciation for cooking and making, and to respect the tools. It also demystified candy, once I realized I can make my own sweets at any time. I know my mom well enough to know she didn't anticipate that, but I'm grateful nonetheless. Thanks for the walk down memory lane, Max.
Here on Brazil we make this candy with sugar and coconut milk, the final texture melts in your mouth when made properly. We usually make this for birthday parties.
Probably misspelling it but guessing you're talking about "brigadero" (the fudge balls covered in coconut shavings/sprinkles). It's tasty and goes quickly.
@@Vaeldarg Brigadeiro is a different kind of candy and this fudge kind of candy has some variants of it, the one made with chocolate is called brigadeiro and the one made with coconut is called beijinho (with means little kiss). The one I'm talking about is another coconut candy.
@@lynxlightning9505 The ingredients are easy, but the tecnic is kind of complicated. I can try to explain it to you or give you a link to a video for it, although it's in portuguese you can try to follow what the person is doing.
We made pull candy several times when I was a child. We flavored it with McCormick extracts and we didn't pull it nearly as long as this recipe so the candy was more translucent.
My late grandmother was born in 1900, and your episode reminded me of the stories she told me of Halloween when she was a girl. Anyway, I have a sudden craving for some candy now.
We used to make this every year, smelling vinegar always brings me back home and I am 75! This is actually very good candy. We used to wrap the pieces in waxed paper. Fun family activity with a great treat at the end!
I love this! I’m sure like 509 people have already said it, but the vinegar probably serves more as a stabilizer than a flavoring. Candy making is almost as fun as tormenting the citizens of your town on Halloween!
Old recipes like pointing out the saddest ingredient, and making it the focus. Vinegar candy, water pie, mayonnaise cake.. I’m so glad modernity prefers the nuances of keeping “secret” ingredients
Hooray for civic organizations trying to make their communities a better place to live. My Cuban grandmother used to make a taffy with honey and peanuts. My sister and I would pull it and it looked like your taffy. I hope to learn more about old fashion candies next year. Thank you for another interesting and entertaining program. :)
In appearance, it reminds me our brazilian Bala de Coco, probably a coconut flavored tropical version of the same recipe. Thank you so much for your hard work in enlighten us in historic culinary with so much fun added. ❤ Love from Brazil.
I'm from around Hiawatha. They still do a Halloween parade every year and it was fun to get a reminder and to get the story. I only knew it was the oldest Halloween parade because of the sign.
I grew up in the northeast of England and to prepare for bonfire night (guy fawkes) we had the tradition of 'bonnie raiding'. Kids from different streets would spend a week building the bonfire and would steal material from neighbouring bonfires. It was exciting as we'd take turns to guard or raid. This was done with the approval of the parents who would step in if it got too rough.
💞💞My family made this candy for giving every Christmas from the 50's until late in the 70's... What wonderful memories! My father was in charge of the pulling after Mother assembled and cooked the ingredients...he doled out to each of us a handful of Taffy that we pulled, slathering our hands with butter. Oh Daddy, it's hot! He would then say to us... put more butter on them and keep pulling! Such wonderful memories, thank you! 👍👻🎃🤗
I remember having a Halloween party in Elementary School. Because some of us were losing our baby teeth, we went "fishing for donuts" instead of bobbing for apples. The teacher tied donuts to strings and we had to catch them.
Thanks for sharing the Scottish origins of Halloween! I've often heard of Samhain when folks want to pinpoint the origins of the holiday, and I think you've talked about it before, but this is the first time I've heard of Scottish kids stealing cabbages and tormenting their neighbors. Who knew the parties were meant to stop the tricks by giving treats! Another great video. Happy Halloween, Max! 🎃
I've seen both the egging and TPing, but not cabbage. As pranks go, I would prefer the TPing. One, TP is not a food item, let alone a messy one. Second, birds can use the TP for their nests, and thirdly, TP actually looks properly spooky, like there are ghosts in the trees. Eggs, and tossed cabbage, are just messy, and it's food wasted. But that's my middle-of-the-road thinking. 🤷♀️
Ohhh my gosh, thank you! When I was a kid, I went to a thing where they had all the kids living like a pioneer for a day. We did many things, and along with milking a cow and making butter, I got to make a firm taffy with vinegar. I have spent thirty or so years looking for that recipe and really thought I'd never find it. So thank you!
hiawatha ks native here! halloween is such a big deal now that growing up you’d probably think it was a national holiday lol! there’s no school that day and going to the parade is a very big deal. the history of it is very important to us and it’s a holiday I hold dear to my heart! so glad you talked about it!!!
I’ve had garlic-chocolate fudge which was actually so good that my Mom and I ate the whole batch I bought and we went back to the garlic festival the next day but the vendor had sold out of all her fudge and closed up. I’ve never found it again. Most people would find it “weird” and wouldn’t try it but the chocolate and the garlic perfectly suited each other. AND it made you feel warm all over.
@@hanzquejano7112 I remember spittting it into my hand because I thought it had "gone bad" somehow but when he said it was garlic flavor I tried it again but only got thru half of it. It was 'odd' because I'd never had garlic taste sweet before. This was also forty years ago so sugary garlic is the best description I can muster 😅
@@jaded_gerManic On sweet garlic, you can actually achieve that by bakin a head of garlic bcuz it cooks off the allin before it can become allicin and create those pungent garlic notes
Omg! There are 3 regions in the US that still have old traditional names for Halloween (or the night before): Mischief Night in New Jersey and Cabbage Night in northern NY, Vermont, and apparently some pockets of the rest of New England (plus Devil's Night in MI). There's a Harvard Dialect Map for this. You've managed to explain the origins of both of the ones I had heard, something I had long wondered about. My college roommate & I both studied linguistics and come from Mischief Night & Cabbage Night lands respectively. Where I grew up, Cabbage Night is the night before Halloween (a way to get around the 'sane' Halloween??), and often involves both large bonfires (in places like the road/town center) from scavenged/stolen wood and cabbage pelting at houses (plus TP or eggs as well) by the town's most rowdy teens.
Growing up in Manitoba in the '70's, we had 'gate night' on Oct 30, which included the egging and toilet papering of houses... a pain because egg on the windows would freeze...
Having grown up in Northern VT, cabbage night was always the night before. I never contributed but always wondered why.. there was always one house that ended up spray painted 😐
👁👀IMPORTANT NOTE!!!!!👁👀 Make sure you lift your candy thermometer up away from the bottom of your pot. About a 1/2 inch so you get the correct read on temp! ❤ Otherwise, if it's touching the bottom it's going to read hotter than it actually is and can hinder your batch you're making. Just wanted to throw that out there as a candy maker ❤❤ My husbands mom made vinegar candy his whole life growing up. I love seeing this video on it. Thanks Max!!
Here in Brazil we would call this "bala de côco" (coconut candy), which would be basically this candy with coconut milk added for flavoring. It's more common to have the harder kind too, for the softer kind we usually make it even softer and cover in coconut flakes and even fill with other flavors (just as we mix everything up here in Brazil 😂).
Loved this! Vinegar candies are still one of my favorites. I adore the medium texture taffy that you can suck on or chew. Also really loved the jack-o-lanterns decorations and pikachu. Usually the background is so blurry they are kind of hard to see. I really liked how it was easier to see them this time.
My condo puts on a Halloween party for the little'uns on Oct. 31. Because we're neighbors, we can have homemade goodies like cupcakes and my homemade marshmallows and chocolate skulls. (Even more welcome for the teens dragged along to a little-kids party are the pizzas we provide!)
So did we! We also made cookies (the kind of sugar cookie that you cut in shapes and decorate), and we would hand them out instead of candy to trick-or-treaters. That all changed by the end of the '80s, and the authorities ordered everyone to only hand out individually-wrapped, sealed, packages of commercially-produced treats, because they were "safer" than homemade ...
My Mother made similar, what was called " Pull Toffee " . Oh, the patience she had as my Brother and I pulled and twisted and pulled and twisted that sticky toffee. Thank you for reminding me of such special Memories.
My grandparents had a farm right outside of Hiawatha- as a child, we would go down to watch the parade. Even as a child, I remember how late the parade was! Happy to see the tiny town my mom grew up in have a moment! It is posted all over the town that they have the longest running Halloween parade 😂
Wonderful video Max and thank you Jose for the captions! I never went to parties when I was a kid, I was surprised to find them so popular when I got older. I would have a holloween day at school with costume contests and treats. After my dad would take us trick or treating with pillowcases as bags and boy did we fill them! People would give handfuls of candy, peanuts in the shell, popcorn balls and apples. I do remember when the myth of razors in apples and poisoned candy went around. Suddenly we stopped getting homemade candy and my parents had to check every single candy of me and my siblings.
Max! You should visit or collaborate with Lofty Pursuits/Public Displays of Confection in Tallahassee! They have a very cool channel largely about making traditional hard candy with historical equipment, I bet you'd really like their videos
When I saw "vinegar candy" I admit I was horrified - it sounds TERRIBLE - but wow!! That looks and sounds like it tastes much, much better than molasses candy, honestly. I'd love to see you tackle a series on the history of popular candy, even the oldest ones! Like Necco Wafer, because I do NOT understand why that was popular. Then again I also don't understand why pastilles are popular :P
We used to soap car windows…. Mom would not allow eggs to leave the house. The grocery stores would not sell eggs to kids for about a week before Halloween.
My Dad, who grew up in the 1940's, had a penchant for stealing cabbages on Hallowe'en - it's just what he did with his friends and yes, they got into trouble many times. I wish he were still here to laugh at his many, many adventures. I miss his stories of him being a delinquent youth, dagnabbit! But thank you for the candy recipe, it looks delicious. And now I know why cabbages were taken on Hallowe'en. Maybe I'll hand out brussels sprouts this year ;)
Nah, they "fixed" 'em and now they don't taste as bitter. Though to be fair, cabbage and brussel sprouts (and broccoli, collard greens, kale, and kohlrabi) are the same species, just like different breeds of dogs can look very different but come from the same stock.
12:10 this feels mean to Mrs Krebs. She could have suggested any number of heavy handed solutions to the issue and instead chose to throw a nice event for the kids to keep them out of trouble. That's lovely!
Although here in Brazil we don't have traditional Halloween parties (they are very recent here, influenced by American media), I think you would love Brazilian coconut candy. It's made with coconut milk and a lot of sugar. Follow the same steps of the vinegar candy and you'll get a hard candy that melts in your mouth. Perfectly delicious.
I live in the Appalachian part of Virginia. The next time I hear older folks in this region complaining about "kids these days" or how immoral they are for going trick-or-treating, I should show them this video 😂. Edit: I want to add that I love the way you pronounce "caramelization." I pronounce it the same way.
Considering that a lot of them may be Christofascists who wanna torment the kids for dressing up as things they don't like for one dumb reason or another and just generally think that Halloween is an evil holiday because they're pissed that their ancestors couldn't fully steal it from Irish pagans, they'd think the vandalism back in the day is better than what happens now.
Yes, one of the things I enjoy about learning history is that you can refute people when they bring up the "Good Ol' Days". It's necessary to provide a more nuanced perspective based on historical facts and context.
Max, I'm so happy that you showed moments from the film Meet Me In St. Louis. It is a favorite movie of mine, and their version of early 1900's Halloween is so interesting to watch. I hope you had a chance to view the entire movie--Judy Garland is wonderful in it.
The children’s prizes mentioned sound perfect for a day of joking, and a good pocket knife, a warm jumper, a raincoat would be welcomed by many a family, the perfume by a mother or aunty. I’ll bet those salt cellars were much coveted, Max!
I'm so delighted to see you feature vinegar candy Max! My Mom used to make vinegar candy and popcorn balls as Halloween treats for our grade school Halloween Carnival back in the early 1970's. She would often give us a small piece of the super warm taffy to pull for ourselves and I would marvel at how she was able to handle that hot taffy with her hands, she always made the "hard crack" version and it was delicious!
i figure the vinegar is more for dissolving the masses of sugar rather than giving any sort of flavoring to the candy. i'd love to hear more history about halloween and the candies we associate with it! hell, maybe even a history lesson on count chocula and the gang?
![[MV] A leap of faith...ความเชื่อใจครั้งสุดท้าย (From "Petrichor the series")](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/U1piZH2CNXA/mqdefault.jpg)
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Wish You the Best of time max! And please consider visiting Colombia! 🇨🇴🇨🇴🇨🇴🇨🇴🙏🙏🙏
Good morning!!
You missed LA , CALI ?? ❤🎉
Can you do the history of "rock candy" please?
❤the one in GA is sold outtttt aaahhhggghgg looking for the next close one to Charlotte
Wish you would come to Marylanc
Note to anyone who lives above 3500 ft above sea level: you will need to consult a candy-making chart and adjust for your exact altitude if you strictly use a thermometer, and not the cold water test. Your mixture will take longer to boil, and above 3500 ft, you can easily burn an entire pan of your candy mixture and still not reach the temperature written down in the recipe. You will need to adjust your temperatures, taking your mixture off of the stove at a lower thermometer temp, thanks to being at a higher altitude. Props to anyone in the Mountain Time Zone who has tried to follow a candy recipe and had to throw away a pan belching out black smoke.
My mom has a book of state fair blue ribbbon candy recipies from that area. Makes the best candy at altitude. Def an important thing for all candy makers and food canrs!
omg I moved from the Rockies to East Coast USA and everything bakes so WEIRD here, thanks for spelling it out for me lol
That's what happened when I tried to make a sugar glaze at 6000 feet. Thank you.
Yeaaahhh I tried fudge at 6500 feet and… it didn’t go well
Having lived in the Ozarks for around 5 years. I noticed how different cooking was up there. How we had to adjust cook times and temps of many recipes.
A few years back now the BBC did a series where they put modern confectioners into Tudor, Georgian and Victorian time periods to make sweets the old fashioned way. The Sweet Makers was its title, and they covered the history of sugar at the same time. Was really interesting to watch the old techniques.
I searched within TH-cam, and I believe I found this BBC program. If you search "Tudor Sweet Makers", the video should be listed first. It's a little over 30 minutes long. Thanks for mentioning this program! 🙏🍬
Thanks for that recommendation. Sounds fascinating!
Thanks for this, gonna go find it and watch!
Cool!
got a link on youtube?
For anybody as confused as I was when they heard "Olives A La Natural History" is the name of a food, I went and searched for you: apparently they were...literally olives that were cut and sculpted to look like things from nature such as animals, and as a bonus "Nut Cartoons" were basically just painted nuts to look like people or things...a bit like easter eggs but for halloween
There's a really scary thriller movie about this history. The chestnut something (killer maybe?) But this exact history
Thank you very much. I was wondering about these things.
Wow, those things sound like a huge time-sink to make though! And just to have at a kids' party!
Thank you!
Thank you 😊
Great video! 🎃 I have a "sticky kitchen" story: my (very culinary inclined) grandmother thought that she would try and make her own maple syrup... She tapped the backyard trees, got a couple gallons of sap, and put it on the stove to boil down. She was in the next room when she heard an explosion... There was sticky syrupy sap on the ceiling, the walls, the cupboards, the floor... 😳 It was an epic mess! It happened before I was born, but she told me the story several times. She said that she found syrup in odd places in the kitchen for years. 😆 So, moral of the story: like making candy for the first time, be careful if you ever try to make syrup.
I wonder if that's why they used to do it outdoors.
@@stevenschnepp576 - 💯
Sounds as if your grandmother was using a pressure cooker to speed up the process and it blew. Fortunate for her that she was not in the room when it exploded, she might have been badly injured by the boiling liquid.
Maple syrup is typically made outdoors because of the sheer volume of sap that must be boiled away to produce the viscous syrup. Depending upon the percent of sugar in the sap; it can take upwards of 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup! Imagine hauling all that sap into your kitchen. Also, the lengthy boiling process will create a great deal of steam (which can be sticky) and leave you with a mess in the kitchen.
Commercial maple producers often use a reverse osmosis system initially to remove the bulk of the water before finishing off in the traditional metal pans. Using a wood fire imparts a subtle smoky flavor to the resultant syrup. In many parts of the Northeast and Canada, maple sugar season is a community affair and provides an opportunity for social interactions between families and friends.
My sticky kitchen moment involves making crabapple jelly. They don't tell you all the steam eventually cools and coates EVERYTHING, and resists clean up. I thought my mom was going to kill me
My best friend and I tried to make caramel when we were abt 12. We melted sugar in a pot on the stove, it turned brown and smelled good, so we poured it onto a piece of wax paper on her kitchen table. It hardened to the table and we couldn't lift it so she got a meat mallet and gave me a knife and we proceeded to beat and scrape off what we could. Needless to say, her parents were furious when they returned home and my father, who owns a furniture store, helped to replace the table. Moral of the story, hot melted sugar is carbon, not caramel
I love my grandma's stories about what Halloween used to be like. It was basically a children's version of The Purge. "Trick or Treat" is just a figure of speech now but back then it was an ultimatum
I pity any trick-or-treater that dares to knock upon Max Miller's door, lest they be subjected to a 20 minute lecture on the entire history of halloween before they are allowed to leave
😂 they should be so lucky!
@@TastingHistory😂😂😂😂
I want to see their cat’s costume though. C’man Max and Jose!
yall really gonna tempt me to fly to California just so I can knock on his door and be subjected to a 20 minute lecture on the entire history of halloween
I would be the kid who would need their parent to drag them away. I love learning history.
I was a child in the 60s before people started freaking out about homemade Halloween treats. My brother and I had a ranking system and the homemade stuff was #1- cookies, brownies, caramel apples, popcorn balls. I remember my mom making popcorn balls and Rice Krispie treats to give out. #2 was anything chocolate, #3 was caramels, Tootsie Rolls, taffy and all the chewy stuff, and the rock bottom was hard candy. Old ladies gave out Starlight mints.
in 1972, an old lady gave me a can of corn. She'd forgotten what night it was and had no candy. I was five and very confused when she handed the can to me.
@@leannsmarie I once got walnuts (in shell) because the elderly couple said they hadn't expected anybody. That would have been late eighties to early nineties
@@leannsmarie In '78 one old widower gave me a handful of cheese puffs. I think I may have been the only kid to knock on his door, because I had to explain trick-or-treating to him.
A famous Motown star used to give the kids of Beverly Hills an apple. They didn't like her.
One older lady in grandma's neighborhood was low-key famous for giving out full size candy bars. I say low-key because that wasn't info one shared with everyone. It's been over 20 years but I bet I could still find the right house.
None of my Grandma's Halloween parties were ever complete without her signature vinegar candy
We used to give them to the problematic children
I suspect she used a lot more vinegar
@@DaemonPrimarch😂
Pigs in a blanket made with oysters?! I think you're gonna have to do an episode on that, Max!
Like savory crepes ?
@@redwolfdarkmoon5326 looked online and a recipe from 1884 said its large oysters wrapped with thin cut bacon seasoned with salt and pepper, cooked on a pan till crisp and served on toast
YES!!!
Now I'm so nostalgic! I was 14 yrs old (74 now) my Dad & I made this from his hand written recipe (At 13 yrs He had to sneak ingredients to make it) Thank you for the treasured memory of my Dad & I.
That is awesome! Give it a try
Forget the ghosts and goblins; combinations of words like “cabbage candy” or “vinegar candy” are the real horrors
That’s because you’ve never actually had vinegar candy. I don’t know about cabbage candy, though…
😂
The cabbage candy sounds just as questionable as the turnip infusion a bartender I met was making 😳
I'm an absolute noodle for vinegar so I could see a world in which it's good. But cabbage candy? Absolutely not. At it's best, cabbage doesnt taste like anything. At it's worst, it tastes like farts.
I grew up eating green cabbage and peanut butter together. I know it sounds horrible, but it's great! Max, if you're reading this, give it a try, pretty please? Simply layer peanut butter onto a cabbage leaf, fold it over (sandwich style) for easy handling, and eat! Don't knock it til you try it, guys!
Oh my God, thank you! My grandma used to make this. We lived in a poor coal mining town in West Virginia, and she would make pounds of this with other foods for the miners. I have been wanting to try this candy again for decades, it was my favorite as a child.
Can get a little messy, but tasty.
My Gramma made to, too. 😊
I was raised in Huntington West Virginia and my grandma made it too! Also with molasses taffy. Hello neighbor❤
Was I the only one waiting for Max to clink the harder candy together like the hard tack?😂
Yes! Me too *clack clack*
Same
Lol clack clack!
Clack clack!
Lmao it’s like a running gag in this channel
Laura mentions going to a taffy pull in the Little House books. Taffy pulls were often courting events meant for young people to get to know each other and flirt. Sort of like a going to a dance or social. Teen boys and girls would be paired to pull the taffy and talk to each other for the 20 minutes or so it took to pull the taffy, and then continue socializing as they then ate the taffy together.
I have probably seen Meet Me in St. Louis more than half a dozen times in the last 4 decades. Of course, the scenes of Judy Garland singing in that movie are memorable and iconic ("Have Yourself a Merry Christmas"). But those chaotic Halloween scenes always hit me like a fever dream. The kids (little kids) almost seem demonic in how out of control they are- running wild, burning things, and playing horrible tricks on their neighbors. And now I know it was actually based on historic fact. LOL! Thanks, Max.
Honestly, I'm glad that the idea of "Throw them a party until they tuckered themselves out" was chosen over "beat the kids senseless beyond reason".
The fact they didn't take that route speaks volumes of the hell those kids raised back then. Probably had the adults too shook.
maybe they tried and it didnt work
@@timk8869 They were probably beating them all the other days anyway.
beat 'em and they'll make sure to do it worse next time lmao
hey, the one thing does not exclude the other
"My cabbages!" - Cabbage merchant, Avatar: The Last Airbender
Having grown up calling the night before Halloween Cabbage Night, this really puts that into context now!
Really?! Where are you from?
@@TastingHistory New England!
😂😂😂 (Bet you didn't.)
Western MA native here. Ya. October 30th was always Cabbage Night.
I grew up in Western Mass too, and it was always called cabbage night. Though I've also heard it called mischief night before too.
I was awed by his ability to say "hotter equals harder" with a straight face
There's nothing naughty about saying that. So yeah. Maybe you should let us see your browsing history 😂
😂 no
So glad you used the Fanny Farmer Boston school cookbook recipe. I remember making this exact recipe with my grandma. Her old fanny farmer cookbook from the 40's is one of my prized possessions.
I have the Austrian Fanny Amann school cookbook. 😂
My grandma was born in 1904 and she used to love to tell us kids about her childhood. They made all their own candy back when she was growing up - they didn't have much money and 9 kids to feed! It always sounded like another world to me, I was born in the 60's and we had all packaged store-bought candy.
I joined a Halloween costume contest when I was a kid that was hosted by my relatives. I came in dressed as Dracula. My parents would never let me check myself in the mirror cos according to them my make up looked scary enough to give me nightmares and apparently they were right cos I won the best costume award with my uncle emphasizing my scary makeup. The prize was a tub of ice cream with the flavor of my choice and a VHS tape with a horror movie of my choice. Fun times
@ghostdragon4164 - Every year, Provincetown on Cape Cod, has a parade with a theme for which many onlookers wear costumes. On year was "Myths & Legends". I bought a housecoat, fuzzy slippers, a hand mirror, a big tube of lipstick, along with a swim cap onto which I glued 100 toy snakes - I was "Medusa, primping". Although not technically on Halloween, later at the party at Town Hall, I won BEST COSTUME. My prize was a Cajun cookbook and CDs of a Cajun musical group to arrive by mail, though nothing ever came. So my win was a hollow victory. B^( But fun!
You'd have been SOL checking your reflection anyways since vampires don't have any. So they were just sticking to the canon.
Was gonna say the same thing! @@exzyle2k
@@exzyle2k That's the scary part. Their vampire costume was so incredibly accurate that they actually didn't have a reflection.
Did they at least take your picture so you could see it when you were older??
my aunt used to own a candy factory. When we'd go visit her, she'd take all the kids into the "Taffy Pulling Room" (mentioned as the cure for Mike TV in Willy Wonka) and we'd make the sticky kind Max makes here. Only we'd roll the wad of candy in powdered cinnamon or ginger or mint leaves while stretching and twisting it.
Also, I know I always bring up Laura Ingalls Wilder, but in her book, Farmer Boy, about her husband Almanzo's childhood in northern New York State, there is a good description of making candy like this. One of the characters says that usually it would be made in the wintertime, but the children in the book are unsupervised for a week in the summer while their parents are away, and make the candy anyway, and it won't harden. Theirs was brown because it was made with molasses.
Thank you for the memories! I am 63 and we use to make this candy at my church when I was a little girl. We made it not just at Halloween but at different parties during the cold months. It was called candy pulling parties. We had so much fun with a partner and you would always get tickled. Our candy was very vinegary and sometimes we added food dye. Those were such good times . Have a fun and safe 🎃 Halloween.
I've heard a lot of stories about the origins of Halloween but this is the first I've heard about the Scottish cabbage tradition. Thanks for teaching me about that, Max!
Always something new to learn. It never ends 😁
When I grew up in Boston in the 60s we had Cabbage Night, I believe on the 30th. It was basically community-sanctioned vandalism 😊
Same here, and I'm Agnostic Pagan. So I thought I've already heard many of the stories involving Samhain/Halloween. But I seem to learn something new with each episode. Thanks, Max and José!
@@TastingHistory I'd always heard that Halloween originated in Ireland (e.g., carving turnips into Jack O'Lanterns). On the other hand . . . there are people with my uncommon maiden surname who insist that our roots began in Scotland, whereas all my ancestors on one side insist that we originated in Ireland. One of the greater Scottish contingent and one of my aunts would do battle about this regularly. I didn't know about this until I met a guy at a company bowling league who shared my maiden name. Never heard of him before, and he wasn't part of my extended family. *He* was the one who'd done battle with my aunt over the years, and that was the first I'd ever heard of Scotland perhaps being involved. Go figure!
@@SputnikDeb There's so much cultural crossover between Scotland and Ireland that it would be really hard to pinpoint exactly where and when the traditions first popped up. Most likely it's just an amalgamation of various regional celebrations/traditions that organically spread out and adapted over time, much like how the US version of Halloween has changed from its origins. So it's likely that both sides of your family are right (or wrong, lol.)
I love the idea that our modern tradition of dressing kids up in Superman costumes and giving them candy has its roots in what basically sounds like the 19th century version of the Purge.
Wait till you learn exactly why Christmas was cancelled back in the day in England. Not only was it seen as "pagan" but it was basically an excuse for folks to fuck shit up.
Of course, banning Christmas also led to riots in the streets so that backfired.
My father was looking after me when I was little and I read a Raggedy Ann and Andy book with one story called The Taffy Pull. It wasn't exactly a recipe but it gave us a rough idea of what we needed. Sugar, butter, and vinegar! It took two tries but we did actually make some taffy. I just sent him a link to this video. I think he'll get a kick out of it.
@WillLaPuerta - Sweet memory.
That's the kind of thing that would've been the most fun a kid can have.
@@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721 Definitely. But I would advise it do be done only with an older child, or a child that listens well if young. Hot sugar burns are catastrophic, and you don't want a kid touching that sugar while it's cooking, or before it's cooled enough to start pulling safely
I was a child in the 1970s, and my sisters and I used to "pull" vinegar taffy sometimes. It's actually really good! We also had parties where we bobbed for apples, and the neighbors still gave out homemade treats when we trick-or-treated at their doors (although my mother made us say "Happy Halloween" instead of "trick-or-treat", because she thought it was more polite). This was a fun episode to watch and sent me on a sweet trip down nostalgia lane 😀😀😀 (Although it sounds like in earlier centuries, Halloween was more like "The Purge" for kids!)
this is making so many memories come forward, one year, about 3 years before my father died, he and my mama decided that instead of waiting for their great grand kids to come and trick or treat them, they got dressed up in costumes and went to the great grand kids'houses before they left for their trick or treating and trick or treated the kids....the great grand kids loved it, now those great grand kids are in their 30's and still remember when their gramma and grampa trick or treated them...my parents had a great sense of humor.
My mom told me about all the homemade treats she got when she trick or treated as a kid. Popcorn balls were one of her faveorites.
I got popcorn balls a couple times- they were a favorite, nothing was going to make me throw those away!
Popcorn balls were my Mother's Christmas treat. I figured her Mother having six children's during the depression was a reason as an inexpensive sweet , colorful treat. It was better with at least two people making the balls as hot and needed to work quickly with buttered hands.
I was the popcorn ball maker in our family. We lived way out in the country and didn't have any trick or treaters (or any neighbors to trick or treat from!) so they were all ours!
I made popcorn balls and molasses poof candy (which is what I thought the vinegar candy was going to be, see recipe below) from my grandma's old recipe cards when I was 12ish. My mom was trying to get me to learn to cook/follow a recipie better and told me we could make any recipe I found in her box, so my sweet tooth self went straight for the candies!
So molasses poofs start like this with vinegar instead of water to dissolve the sugar and a bit of molasses (or honey if you perfer) for flavor, but then after you reach hard crack stage you dump in a tablespoon of baking soda and stir the whole thing, from the bottom for 10-15 seconds before you dump it into the pan, spread it flat, and leave it to cool until hard. Then you crack it up into pieces that would fit into your mouth and either eat it all right away or in a day or 2 tops if stored in an airtight container. You can also coat it in chocolate to make it last for a little longer, but any poof part exposed to air will melt from the humidity. Yes it's as messy as a volcano made the same way, yes, your pot needs to be twice the size you think you need. The smashing of the candy can be a bit of a problem in terms of shattered sugar dust all over the place. I got the wise idea to use a muffin tin layered with choco chips to make smaller pieces, but that did not go according to plan...
Oh yes homemade popcorn balls... factory made didn't come close.
Pro tip: you can use a pastry brush dipped in water to GENTLY brush the sides of the pan to dissolve any sugar crystals that may be clinging to the sides. They act kind of like seeds and can cause a chain reaction of crystallization and ruin your candy.
@mattwilson8298 - That is also a good tip to use when making invert sugar
HOWEVER if you put string or wooden sticks into the syrup and CAUSE a run-away chain reaction, you end with yet another old-fashioned sugary treat, rock candy.
When I went to culinary trade school in HS my Principal's family ran a candy shop locally from the early 1900's. He showed us many things his family had made for a variety of holidays over the century. These types of candies still amaze me. And, I blew a whole lot of money on a marble slab just to make candy canes for my kids from scratch every year.
how lovely
I use a marble slab to cut leather.
My brother and his family lived in a town that was the HQ of a huge, well-known, international candy company. His kids' school Halloween (and other holidays) parties and other local Halloween activities used to get absolutely deluged with candy the company donated.
Lofty pursuits has a great channel on youtube for this sort of thing.
I'm sure they tasted good 😊❤
When my grandma passed i got a bunch of her old recipes & cookbooks. She had this old, old recipe for a ‘Vinegar Pie’. Essentially a sugar Creme pie with a healthy addition of white vinegar. I’ve never been brave enough to try it but just the idea of a vinegar pie lives in my brain rent-free
My Grandmother used to make my Dad vinegar pie. He loved it and wanted me to find a recipe. I haven't quite gotten it right yet but the search continues. It's very good tbh.
Just make it. The vinegar just contributes some acidity, just like lemon juice.
As part Irish American and a huge fan of Halloween, I Thank you for bringing the origin story of the holiday because it came from both Scotland and Ireland Gaelic countries.
Really? I knew a few people from Scotland when I lived in Canada. They wouldn’t allow their kids to go out ‘begging for candy’. If it had only been 1 family I probably wouldn’t have noticed
The Irish origins of Halloween are fascinating.
th-cam.com/video/ttCngH088Fg/w-d-xo.html
Halloween has little to do with Scotland and especially not Ireland
The vinegar is for texture rather than flavor, preventing crystallization by breaking some of the sucrose bonds into glucose and fructose. The glucose and fructose prevent the build up of sucrose, stopping crystallization and also resulting in a more uniform-textured candy. Cream of tartar is another acid that is very commonly added to taffies for the same purpose.
I'd love to see what a Midnight Cake looks like in real life.
Wow, the taffy ended up looking really cute!
This, please!
Yes! I need to know how Midnight Cake is different than other cakes!
I found the recipe online:
Ingredients
1/2 cup shortening
1-1/4 cups sugar
2 eggs
1 cup hot water
1/2 cup cocoa
1-1/2 cups sifted Gold Medal "Kitchen-tested" flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 egg white
3/4 cup sugar
1/8 teaspoon cream of tartar
3 tablespoons water
1/2 teaspoon vanilla (or other flavoring)
Instructions
Cream shortening, add sugar gradually, and cream until fluffy.
Blend in well-beaten eggs.
Slowly add hot water to cocoa and mix until smooth. Stir to dissolve completely.
Sift flour, salt, soda, and baking powder together, and add to creamed mixture alternately with hot water and cocoa mixture.
Blend in vanilla.
Pour into an 8-inch square pan (2-1/2 inches deep) which has been greased and lined with paper.
Bake 50 to 55 minutes in a moderate oven (350 F).
Now for the frosting: Combine in top of a double boiler the egg white, sugar, cream of tartar, and water, and beat together just enough to completely blend ingredients.
Place over rapidly boiling water, and beat with rotary beater until mixture is white and very light. (Icing is done when it barely holds its shape and is not runny as the beater is pulled out.)
This takes 5 to 7 minutes depending on the size of boiler and vigor of beating.
Remove from over hot water, and do not beat any more.
Fold in the flavoring.
Spread on the cake.
I would like this comment but it's at a Nice like ratio
That looked a lot like a devil's food type Black Midnight Cake my mother used to make, originally from a Betty Crocker cookbook. She iced it with a slightly fluffy meringue type White Mountain Frosting also from Betty Crocker, which looked a lot like what the version shown in the video was using.
Omg i never knew that history of Halloween. We immigrated from the Netherlands in 58. The neighbours in the apartment complex initiated us kids into going trick or treating. We were shocked, going and knocking on strangers doors and demanding candy while wearing a costume? How strange, how exciting. The last few years we lived in a neighbourhood with a lot of new immigrants too and it was obvious that they felt the same way.
Well when you ban allthe Catholic holidays you need some sort of ruse to keep diong them. In Scotland we revived old pagan stuff. In the Nederlands you got Bla....
As a Child in the 60s I was taken to the Halloween parade in Hiawatha. I did not realize that it went back so far, but for my Dad it was a memory of His youth.
One time my sister had to proctor a test on Halloween (not her decision) and she felt so bad about it she made candy corn for everyone. Two batches, one with vegan butter for that crowd. She makes Really good candy corn
My grandma use to make vinegar punch and it was surprisingly refreshing. I may try making the vinegar candy just for the hell of it.
Kinda like switchel.
Im imagining pumpkin spice switchel now
Seconding the switchel - one of its nicknames is "Haymaker's Punch," so I'm guessing your grandmother's was similar. It can contain helpful stuff like electrolyes for people with labor-intense jobs (like bailing hay). It's quite tasty!
I love apple cider vinegar in iced water. It's especially great on hot days, and when feeling a little off, and it seems to suppress the appetite
@@TastingHistorymy first thought was posca tbh.
I’m over 70, my mother and my aunts made vinegar candy as treats a few times a year with us kids involved in the folding and kneading “taffy pull”. I thought it was a French-Canadian thing like the Barley Candy lollipops the nuns would make. To me both were delicious but, what did we know in the 1950s?
Hehe, yeah, I thought it was a Swedish thing 😛 We have a peppermint version here, very similar to candy canes. And Brazil apparently has a coconut version 😄
I was thinking about the barley sugar too.
@@OliveJewel Mmm, barley candy, so good! Used to come in such fancy shapes, too!
I grew up in a town in northeast New Jersey in the 1970s, and we always called the night before Halloween "Cabbage Night". It was the night when kids threw toilet paper at houses, etc., but was always pretty tame. It seemed we were the only town whose kids (and adults) called it "Cabbage Night". We never knew why but always wondered how it got that strange name, and now I know. Thank you!
We had "Devil's Night" in Michigan.
Yeah, I grew up in north-central NJ (Morris County), and it was always Mischief Night. Never heard of Cabbage Night. It was mostly TP-ing, soaping windows, and (from the "bad" kids) egging houses.
Beggars Night in my Chicago suburb. They had bonfires.
My mom taught me how to use the candy thermometer leading into the holidays of my preteens. We got pretty handy at making what we wanted from each stage. I highly recommend for parents because it really helped instill a deep love and appreciation for cooking and making, and to respect the tools. It also demystified candy, once I realized I can make my own sweets at any time. I know my mom well enough to know she didn't anticipate that, but I'm grateful nonetheless. Thanks for the walk down memory lane, Max.
Petition to get Max to Lofty Pursuits to learn old fashioned candy making from the masters
Yes! I just made a comment to the same effect
Here on Brazil we make this candy with sugar and coconut milk, the final texture melts in your mouth when made properly. We usually make this for birthday parties.
That sounds great! Recipe??
@marich8356 - Sounds wonderful!
Probably misspelling it but guessing you're talking about "brigadero" (the fudge balls covered in coconut shavings/sprinkles). It's tasty and goes quickly.
@@Vaeldarg Brigadeiro is a different kind of candy and this fudge kind of candy has some variants of it, the one made with chocolate is called brigadeiro and the one made with coconut is called beijinho (with means little kiss). The one I'm talking about is another coconut candy.
@@lynxlightning9505 The ingredients are easy, but the tecnic is kind of complicated. I can try to explain it to you or give you a link to a video for it, although it's in portuguese you can try to follow what the person is doing.
We made pull candy several times when I was a child. We flavored it with McCormick extracts and we didn't pull it nearly as long as this recipe so the candy was more translucent.
My grandma always called candy corn 'chicken feed' and I still call it that! I didnt realize that it wasnt something that grandma made up, haha!
My late grandmother was born in 1900, and your episode reminded me of the stories she told me of Halloween when she was a girl. Anyway, I have a sudden craving for some candy now.
There used to be "taffy pulls" at churches and school activities when I was a kid in the 60s and 70s but I havent heard of any in a looong time 😊
My Mom is from Hiawatha. They still do the parade and it's something they are proud of.
That haunted look that Max has while saying that his kitchen is now sticky says so much.
No candy could be as sweet as Maxxy ❤
Awwww 🥰
@@TastingHistory❤❤❤❤❤❤
❤
Awwww ❤
This comment is just as nice as he is😊
Wow. I've never heard a history of Halloween before that covers anything besides Samhain. This absolutely blew my mind! Thanks Max!
We used to make this every year, smelling vinegar always brings me back home and I am 75! This is actually very good candy. We used to wrap the pieces in waxed paper. Fun family activity with a great treat at the end!
I love this! I’m sure like 509 people have already said it, but the vinegar probably serves more as a stabilizer than a flavoring. Candy making is almost as fun as tormenting the citizens of your town on Halloween!
Old recipes like pointing out the saddest ingredient, and making it the focus. Vinegar candy, water pie, mayonnaise cake.. I’m so glad modernity prefers the nuances of keeping “secret” ingredients
Vinegar in small amounts adds many fruity or sweet flavors! Its the other reason it's in pie crust
No, it's also the flavor! (and it's WONDERFUL! Think "shrub")
Chicken feed! I always thought the stuff Cinderella give to the chickens (and gus gus attempts to carry) WAS candy corn 😂 15:55
Hooray for civic organizations trying to make their communities a better place to live. My Cuban grandmother used to make a taffy with honey and peanuts. My sister and I would pull it and it looked like your taffy. I hope to learn more about old fashion candies next year. Thank you for another interesting and entertaining program. :)
In appearance, it reminds me our brazilian Bala de Coco, probably a coconut flavored tropical version of the same recipe. Thank you so much for your hard work in enlighten us in historic culinary with so much fun added. ❤ Love from Brazil.
Max’s exercise program is definitely paying off. Keep it up, Max! You’re adorable.
Thank you!!
don't thank us! You're the one doing the work 💜
The first thing I thought when I clicked the video was damn max is getting swole 😆
I'm from around Hiawatha. They still do a Halloween parade every year and it was fun to get a reminder and to get the story. I only knew it was the oldest Halloween parade because of the sign.
I grew up in the northeast of England and to prepare for bonfire night (guy fawkes) we had the tradition of 'bonnie raiding'. Kids from different streets would spend a week building the bonfire and would steal material from neighbouring bonfires. It was exciting as we'd take turns to guard or raid. This was done with the approval of the parents who would step in if it got too rough.
💞💞My family made this candy for giving every Christmas from the 50's until late in the 70's... What wonderful memories! My father was in charge of the pulling after Mother assembled and cooked the ingredients...he doled out to each of us a handful of Taffy that we pulled, slathering our hands with butter. Oh Daddy, it's hot! He would then say to us... put more butter on them and keep pulling! Such wonderful memories, thank you! 👍👻🎃🤗
I remember having a Halloween party in Elementary School. Because some of us were losing our baby teeth, we went "fishing for donuts" instead of bobbing for apples. The teacher tied donuts to strings and we had to catch them.
You've recently become my favorite channel. Nothing is better than a history lesson involving food.
Hey thank you.
Thanks for sharing the Scottish origins of Halloween! I've often heard of Samhain when folks want to pinpoint the origins of the holiday, and I think you've talked about it before, but this is the first time I've heard of Scottish kids stealing cabbages and tormenting their neighbors. Who knew the parties were meant to stop the tricks by giving treats! Another great video. Happy Halloween, Max! 🎃
I've seen both the egging and TPing, but not cabbage. As pranks go, I would prefer the TPing. One, TP is not a food item, let alone a messy one. Second, birds can use the TP for their nests, and thirdly, TP actually looks properly spooky, like there are ghosts in the trees. Eggs, and tossed cabbage, are just messy, and it's food wasted. But that's my middle-of-the-road thinking. 🤷♀️
There was an old Acadian tradition of stealing cabbages on Halloween, but they used it make Soupe de la Toussaint, or All Saint's Day Soup.
Ohhh my gosh, thank you! When I was a kid, I went to a thing where they had all the kids living like a pioneer for a day. We did many things, and along with milking a cow and making butter, I got to make a firm taffy with vinegar. I have spent thirty or so years looking for that recipe and really thought I'd never find it. So thank you!
hiawatha ks native here! halloween is such a big deal now that growing up you’d probably think it was a national holiday lol! there’s no school that day and going to the parade is a very big deal. the history of it is very important to us and it’s a holiday I hold dear to my heart! so glad you talked about it!!!
My uncle gave us garlic hard candy once. My brother loved it and asked for more while I just thought it odd. Happy Spooky Month everbody! 🎉👽🧟♀️👻🧛
Question, do they taste like garlic? Sounds pretty obvious but a lot of food don't taste like their name.
I’ve had garlic-chocolate fudge which was actually so good that my Mom and I ate the whole batch I bought and we went back to the garlic festival the next day but the vendor had sold out of all her fudge and closed up.
I’ve never found it again. Most people would find it “weird” and wouldn’t try it but the chocolate and the garlic perfectly suited each other. AND it made you feel warm all over.
@@hanzquejano7112 I remember spittting it into my hand because I thought it had "gone bad" somehow but when he said it was garlic flavor I tried it again but only got thru half of it. It was 'odd' because I'd never had garlic taste sweet before. This was also forty years ago so sugary garlic is the best description I can muster 😅
@@jaded_gerManic On sweet garlic, you can actually achieve that by bakin a head of garlic bcuz it cooks off the allin before it can become allicin and create those pungent garlic notes
That might come in handy on St Andrew’s Day to compliment the garlic heavy roast with parsley root
Omg! There are 3 regions in the US that still have old traditional names for Halloween (or the night before): Mischief Night in New Jersey and Cabbage Night in northern NY, Vermont, and apparently some pockets of the rest of New England (plus Devil's Night in MI). There's a Harvard Dialect Map for this. You've managed to explain the origins of both of the ones I had heard, something I had long wondered about.
My college roommate & I both studied linguistics and come from Mischief Night & Cabbage Night lands respectively.
Where I grew up, Cabbage Night is the night before Halloween (a way to get around the 'sane' Halloween??), and often involves both large bonfires (in places like the road/town center) from scavenged/stolen wood and cabbage pelting at houses (plus TP or eggs as well) by the town's most rowdy teens.
Growing up in Manitoba in the '70's, we had 'gate night' on Oct 30, which included the egging and toilet papering of houses... a pain because egg on the windows would freeze...
Having grown up in Northern VT, cabbage night was always the night before. I never contributed but always wondered why.. there was always one house that ended up spray painted 😐
👁👀IMPORTANT NOTE!!!!!👁👀 Make sure you lift your candy thermometer up away from the bottom of your pot. About a 1/2 inch so you get the correct read on temp! ❤ Otherwise, if it's touching the bottom it's going to read hotter than it actually is and can hinder your batch you're making. Just wanted to throw that out there as a candy maker ❤❤ My husbands mom made vinegar candy his whole life growing up. I love seeing this video on it. Thanks Max!!
Here in Brazil we would call this "bala de côco" (coconut candy), which would be basically this candy with coconut milk added for flavoring. It's more common to have the harder kind too, for the softer kind we usually make it even softer and cover in coconut flakes and even fill with other flavors (just as we mix everything up here in Brazil 😂).
Loved this! Vinegar candies are still one of my favorites. I adore the medium texture taffy that you can suck on or chew. Also really loved the jack-o-lanterns decorations and pikachu. Usually the background is so blurry they are kind of hard to see. I really liked how it was easier to see them this time.
My condo puts on a Halloween party for the little'uns on Oct. 31. Because we're neighbors, we can have homemade goodies like cupcakes and my homemade marshmallows and chocolate skulls. (Even more welcome for the teens dragged along to a little-kids party are the pizzas we provide!)
We always made popcorn balls. I remember buttering our hands to mold them into balls.
So did we! We also made cookies (the kind of sugar cookie that you cut in shapes and decorate), and we would hand them out instead of candy to trick-or-treaters. That all changed by the end of the '80s, and the authorities ordered everyone to only hand out individually-wrapped, sealed, packages of commercially-produced treats, because they were "safer" than homemade ...
❤ It's fun.
17:43 Well, Max, thanks for reminding an old lady of this useful and nearly forgotten fact. The reverse is indeed true, as well.
There's nothing scarier in this Halloween video than Buttered. Hands.
My Mother made similar, what was called
" Pull Toffee " . Oh, the patience she had as my Brother and I pulled and twisted and pulled and twisted that sticky toffee. Thank you for reminding me of such special Memories.
My grandparents had a farm right outside of Hiawatha- as a child, we would go down to watch the parade. Even as a child, I remember how late the parade was! Happy to see the tiny town my mom grew up in have a moment! It is posted all over the town that they have the longest running Halloween parade 😂
That pikachu and the pumpkins are perfect max! So cute! Hearth for fan please! ❤️❤️❤️❤️🎃🎃🧡🧡🧡🖤
♥️ 💜 ❤️
@@TastingHistory 🥹🥹🥹🥹
The squished looking jackolantern is so cute.
@@angelinaduganNy cute indeed! 🎃I need one, I wonder where Max got it from? Anyway, happy spooky season everyone 🧡🖤💜
Wonderful video Max and thank you Jose for the captions!
I never went to parties when I was a kid, I was surprised to find them so popular when I got older. I would have a holloween day at school with costume contests and treats. After my dad would take us trick or treating with pillowcases as bags and boy did we fill them! People would give handfuls of candy, peanuts in the shell, popcorn balls and apples. I do remember when the myth of razors in apples and poisoned candy went around. Suddenly we stopped getting homemade candy and my parents had to check every single candy of me and my siblings.
Um, it wasn't a myth in Lodi California, where needles were placed in apples.
@@dorothy7743 do you have sources for this?
Max! You should visit or collaborate with Lofty Pursuits/Public Displays of Confection in Tallahassee! They have a very cool channel largely about making traditional hard candy with historical equipment, I bet you'd really like their videos
When I saw "vinegar candy" I admit I was horrified - it sounds TERRIBLE - but wow!! That looks and sounds like it tastes much, much better than molasses candy, honestly.
I'd love to see you tackle a series on the history of popular candy, even the oldest ones! Like Necco Wafer, because I do NOT understand why that was popular. Then again I also don't understand why pastilles are popular :P
Necco wafers were truly the stuff of nightmares 😂
We used to soap car windows…. Mom would not allow eggs to leave the house. The grocery stores would not sell eggs to kids for about a week before Halloween.
Bad kids! 😂
Doing a seamless ad read is an art form and Max is an ✨A R T I S T E✨
My Dad, who grew up in the 1940's, had a penchant for stealing cabbages on Hallowe'en - it's just what he did with his friends and yes, they got into trouble many times. I wish he were still here to laugh at his many, many adventures. I miss his stories of him being a delinquent youth, dagnabbit!
But thank you for the candy recipe, it looks delicious. And now I know why cabbages were taken on Hallowe'en. Maybe I'll hand out brussels sprouts this year ;)
Nah, they "fixed" 'em and now they don't taste as bitter.
Though to be fair, cabbage and brussel sprouts (and broccoli, collard greens, kale, and kohlrabi) are the same species, just like different breeds of dogs can look very different but come from the same stock.
12:10 this feels mean to Mrs Krebs. She could have suggested any number of heavy handed solutions to the issue and instead chose to throw a nice event for the kids to keep them out of trouble. That's lovely!
Although here in Brazil we don't have traditional Halloween parties (they are very recent here, influenced by American media), I think you would love Brazilian coconut candy. It's made with coconut milk and a lot of sugar. Follow the same steps of the vinegar candy and you'll get a hard candy that melts in your mouth. Perfectly delicious.
Oh, I would TOTALLY compete for those hand painted salt cellars! Bring it on!😂
I live in the Appalachian part of Virginia. The next time I hear older folks in this region complaining about "kids these days" or how immoral they are for going trick-or-treating, I should show them this video 😂.
Edit: I want to add that I love the way you pronounce "caramelization." I pronounce it the same way.
Considering that a lot of them may be Christofascists who wanna torment the kids for dressing up as things they don't like for one dumb reason or another and just generally think that Halloween is an evil holiday because they're pissed that their ancestors couldn't fully steal it from Irish pagans, they'd think the vandalism back in the day is better than what happens now.
just remember, even hank hill loves halloween 😅
Yes, one of the things I enjoy about learning history is that you can refute people when they bring up the "Good Ol' Days". It's necessary to provide a more nuanced perspective based on historical facts and context.
I'm not far East of the Blue Ridge and yeah, it's ridiculous hearing about how kids are going to Hell for a costume and candy.
I had an sleepover for my birthday when I was a kid. My mom had us make hard crack taffy. I still remember it at 72. It was really fun and delicious!
You should definitely do a video on candy origins next year. Some of the candies we take for granted today have been around over 100 years!
Max, I'm so happy that you showed moments from the film Meet Me In St. Louis. It is a favorite movie of mine, and their version of early 1900's Halloween is so interesting to watch. I hope you had a chance to view the entire movie--Judy Garland is wonderful in it.
I have a feeling hes definitely watched it in full, probably more than once 😉
The children’s prizes mentioned sound perfect for a day of joking, and a good pocket knife, a warm jumper, a raincoat would be welcomed by many a family, the perfume by a mother or aunty. I’ll bet those salt cellars were much coveted, Max!
I'm so delighted to see you feature vinegar candy Max! My Mom used to make vinegar candy and popcorn balls as Halloween treats for our grade school Halloween Carnival back in the early 1970's. She would often give us a small piece of the super warm taffy to pull for ourselves and I would marvel at how she was able to handle that hot taffy with her hands, she always made the "hard crack" version and it was delicious!
i figure the vinegar is more for dissolving the masses of sugar rather than giving any sort of flavoring to the candy. i'd love to hear more history about halloween and the candies we associate with it! hell, maybe even a history lesson on count chocula and the gang?
I love the pumpkin on the counter in front of his cookbook 1:01
Such a cute display! 🎃
I would love to see a history of candy video! I think that would be very interesting
That's a whole series! Will get there eventually.
@@TastingHistoryThat sounds like a great series idea ❤