ISSUE 53, SWEETS & CANDIES, Part 3: Old Southern Candies
On February 28, 1911, a reporter for the Charleston News & Courier hailed the appearance of the groundnut cake vendors on the city streets as the sure sign of Spring’s advent. At shaded stands on conspicuous corners and on the battery, they sat on three leg stools from dawn to late evening, dispensing “groundnut cakes, cocoanut cakes, horse cakes and gingers at the rate of one cent each..” In a single sentence most of the famous street candies of South Carolina have been introduced. The only missing confection was benne candy.
The cocoanut cakes were more popularly known as monkey meat. The recipe for monkey meat was rather simple--equal parts molasses and brown sugar, a splash of malt vinegar to impart edge--cooked until it would crystalize when a blob was tossed into cold water--then taken from the stove, laid in a pan, whereupon shredded coconut was added (quantity depended on cost of the ingredient), and then worked into a taffy consistency. Flouring one's hands assisted in the last task. The portrait below of the Monkey Meat woman is taken from Harriette Kershaw Leiding's Street Cries of an Old Southern City, a tourist pamphlet privately printed in 1910. Leiding's booklet is particularly interesting for supplying musical notation of the various cries. Monkey Meat was the favorite children's candy of the era in the Lowcountry.
The horse cakes from 1854 were a hard cookie made from spiced molasses dough manufactured by Puckhaber Brothers Baker at 464 King Street and the Marjenhoff’s Charleston Biscuit Works. In other cities ginger was used as a flavoring in horse cakes, but in Charleston ginger biscuits were a separate category. Groundnut cakes, however, held pride of place among these various confections. From the 1830s until World War 1 it was Charleston’s signature candy, rivaled only briefly by Benne cake, a molasses and sesame seed candy.
Benne cake enjoyed its heyday from the 1850s through the 1880s, but disappeared from sellers’ repertoire in the 1890s when benne ceased to be grown as an oil crop in the 1890s after Dr. David Wesson refined the stink of cotton seed oil, creating Wesson oil. Frederick Porcher in his 1849 Medical Botany of South Carolina had noted of benne, “In South Carolina the seeds are largely used by negroes in making broths. They are also eaten parched, and often candied with sugar or molasses” (p. 493). A recipe for bene cake from 1881 survives in Janet Grant Gilmore Howard’s Fifty Years in a Maryland Kitchen:
A tea-cup of the bene seed, washed in several waters and drained to a quart of brown sugar moistened with a tea-cupful of water. Put this on the fire, and when it begins to boil, add the bene seed, stirring nearly all the time to prevent burning or the seed from settling. It is boiled like taffy, but has no butter. To test when it is done, drop a little in a glass of cold water: if it be boiled a little longer. But be careful not to boil it a moment to long, as it will thicken and be difficult to pour out. It must be quickly ladled out and dropped in a round cake, on a marble slab or tin plate. If not taken out quickly, it will so congeal that it cannot be taken out at all (p. 294).
The benne wafer of the twentieth century, with its butter and flour, did not evolve out of the candy.
In the era before the First World War groundnut cake was a signature dish of the city. Just as shrimp & grits, she crab soup, and frogimore stew were iconic foods of the Lowcountry in 2000, groundnut cakes belonged to the list of local delicacies in 1900: “Charleston submits groundnut cakes, palmetto pickle, waffles, shrimp pie, Bull’s Bay oysters, and ricefield turkey, among other strictly local dishes for the delectation of her guests,” August Chronicle (December 16, 1915), 6. When Carolina expatriates dreamed of returning to Charleston, the candy came to mind:
Fancy woke for groundnut cake
That turbaned maumas cried.
The glucose made confections cheat,
And Dixie cookery died. “Charleston Revisited,” 1905.
The remembered cry of the women was recorded by numbers of persons: “Enty yer wan, buy en’ny, I gwine gie brottus, ef yer buy frum me” (2-9-1902). A Brottus [a condensation of the children’s phrase, have you brought us something?] was an add-on, a lagniappe. Generally referred to as Maumas, the women vendors had a traditional public uniform. She “is always neatly dressed, her head gaily turbaned, a clean kerchief crossed over her bosom.” The cakes were displayed on “a clean sheet of brown paper spread over a waiter, which the seller holds on her lap” (1-20-1895). A waiter is a large round platter. Although represented as a generic figure in much reportage, we can ascertain from a number of sources including court records (where the vendors appear in some number as witnesses to occurrences in the street), the names of several of the famous ones. Celia Hall, who occupied the corner of John Street and King Street is perhaps the one with the longest paper trail.
For close the fifty years the price of a groundnut cake remained the same—a penny. As was perhaps inevitable a gentrified, white-folks version of the candy is developed, and finds its way into later editions of Sarah Rutledge’s landmark The Carolina Housewife:
Blanch one pound of peanuts; grind very fine in a marble mortar, adding a little brandy while pounding to prevent oiling. Add ten eggs, one pound of sugar, and one pound of butter. Beat the whole well together; make a puff paste, lay it on your tins, and fill them with the mixture; grate lump sugar over them, and bake in a slow oven.
These peanut tartlets were far too costly for street consumption at a 1 cent price point. Besides, they minimized the peanut flavor by blanching instead of parching the nuts. The Carolina African Runner Peanut—the standard Lowcountry peanut until early in the 20th century is smaller, oilier, and more flavorful (particularly after pan parching) than the Virginia or Valencia varieties. Blanching did not bring out the nuttiness of the legume. Furthermore, as observers of street food noted “in Charleston . . . a fine molasses is used for it instead of sugar” (8-22-1909). An 1895 reporter elaborated this point: “It has been asserted that these vendors of sweets go down on the wharves, where the molasses hogsheads and casks are being unloaded, and scrape up such of the molasses as chanced to leak out or overrun, straining it for use in their confections. Be that as it may, the groundnut cakes are delightful, crisp and wholesome, the syrup boiled to just the right consistency, the nuts selected with care” (1-20-1895). The final product was small and round and regarded by many visitors as “Charleston’s greatest charm” (5-17-1899). Besides molasses and peanuts, an egg white would be added to clarify the syrup. Furthermore they were “highly flavored with lemon peel” (2-9-1902).
The secret of cooking the groundnut cake was the length of time you cooked the molasses (or molasses and brown sugar mixture) before adding the egg white, parched peanuts and lemon flavoring. A half hour for a substantial batch was frequently mentioned as a benchmark. But too short a cooking and the molasses would ooze in the sun, too long and it would be too think to be manageable.
Philadelphia, like Charleston, had a street culture featuring groundnut cakes. Its versions, however, tended to be made from granulation brown or white sugar, and lacked that piquant lemon-molasses-parched peanut forwardness of flavor.
Sources: “Groundnut Cakes,” Charleston News and Courier (February 28, 1911), 8. “The Bread You Eat!” Charleston Evening Post (May 24, 1895), 3. “Charleston Biscuit Works,” Charleston News & Courier (July 20, 1906), 6. Janet Grant Gilmore Howard & Florence Brobeck, Fifty Years in a Maryland Kitchen (Lippincott, 1881), p. 294. “Charleston Revisited,” Charleston Evening Post (March 16, 1905), 2. “With her Face to the East,” Charleston News and Courier (January 20, 1895), 12. “Peanut Candy,” Portland Oregonian (August 22, 1909), 5-6. “Impressions of Charleston,” Charleston Evening Post (May 17, 1899), 7. “At the Exposition,” Winston-Salem Journal (February 9, 1902), 3. “Fod de Wah” Charleston Evening Post (February 5, 1901), 8.