Taffy

Taffy is a chewy candy made with sugar, molasses or corn syrup, butter, and assorted flavorings. Unlike its British cousin, toffee, which is allowed to set before being cut into pieces, American taffy is stretched, by hand or by machine, so that it aerates and assumes a lighter color and more supple consistency.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, taffy appeared in home kitchens and at fairs in the eastern and midwestern states. By the middle of the century, the taffy pull, in which young people gathered with buttered hands to tug ropes of homemade candy, was a popular pastime and courtship ritual. In the 1880s, competing entrepreneurs Joseph Fralinger and Enoch James began packaging saltwater taffy as a souvenir for tourists in the burgeoning seaside resort of Atlantic City, New Jersey, and it quickly caught on in waterfront destinations around the country. Fralinger’s and James’s companies have since merged but maintain their distinct recipes, in which seawater never was an ingredient.