Toffee
Toffee or taffy is a confection made to a variety of recipes by boiling together molasses, treacle or sugar with butter, milk and occasionally flour. The mixture is heated until the temperature reaches 305 - 320°F (known as the hard crack stage to confectioners). Toffee in the making is often mixed with nuts or raisins; this is not done to taffy. Taffy appears to be an older version of the word and is used in America. Taffy is a nickname for a Welshman.
The process of making toffee involves boiling the ingredients until the mix is stiff enough to be pulled into a shape which holds and has a glossy surface. The resulting mixture will typically be poured into a shallow tray and allowed to cool to form a sweet. Different mixes, processes, and (most importantly) temperatures of toffee making will result in different textures and hardnesses, from soft and oftimes sticky to a hard brittle material.
A variant is Cinder Toffee, (also called Honeycomb toffee) in essenace an aerated version which has gaseous bubbles introduced into the structure as the result of the addition of bicarbonate of soda (baking soda) and vinegar during the mixing. The baking soda and vinegar, one a base and the other an acid, react to form carbon dioxide which is trapped in the highly viscous mixture.
Taffy is made to about the same recipe but is pulled, not poured and is always chewy. The lump of candy is continuously pulled and folded as it cools, giving an aerated candy which is cut into bite-sized lumps. Taffy is pulled commercially by machine on metal hooks; however home made taffy is pulled by hand between two people. Taffy pulls were a common social event in the 18th century and still occasionally practiced today. The two-person format allowed romantic possibility and the word "taffy" was sometimes used to mean "flattery". Salt water taffy with its wrapped pastel colored fruit-flavored candies was a noted invention of Atlantic City, New Jersey and a common souvenir of the resort town.
A particular application of toffee is in toffee apples literally apples, normally on wooden sticks, that have been coated by dipping into molten toffee. They are similar to taffy apples or caramel apples which both names for apples which are covered in caramel but not the same as candy apples which are coated in cinnamon hard candy.
The origins of the word are unknown, though older variations include taffy and taffies. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first publication of the word to 1825, though it is not much to be doubted that the sweet dates back considerably further than that. (McGee, 1984 p. 410) claims it to be "from the Creole for a mixture of sugar and molasses" and that it entered the language early in the 19th century.
Owing to its gelatinous properties, toffee has the capacity to pull loose dental fillings from teeth, and for this reason tends not to be favoured by the dental profession.
Toffee gives rise to a reasonably derisive idiom in the British English; it can be said of an incompetent person that they cannot do (whatever it is they cannot do) for toffee.
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