When Taffy Pulling Parties were Popular

Have you ever pulled taffy by hand? I must confess I have not. To be honest, the task sounds difficult and tedious to me. However, I also understand how the task might become much more enjoyable when doing it in the company of others. Taffy pulling became all the rage back in Victorian times, especially during the winter when the weather turned bitterly cold and most activities came to a screeching halt. Both men and women (or young men and young women) attended these events, which also provided a wholesome way for members of the opposite sex to get to know each other better. I wonder how many matches were made from these parties!

If you look up a pioneer recipe for taffy (or toffee, as it was called in Britain), you will find molasses or sorghum to be the main ingredient. That is because sugar became scarce during the Civil War, and the other two were readily available. The molasses or sorghum had to be boiled with water until it formed a soft ball stage, about 250 degrees Fahrenheit. In some recipes, you will find that glycerin is used. In others, cornstarch and corn syrup. Whichever ingredients you use, however, be sure to pour it out onto a buttered surface and butter your hands as well.

After it cools a bit, the taffy can be scraped together and then pulled and folded over. The pulling and folding allows for aeration within the fibers of the candy. As the candy is pulled and folded over, again and again, it hardens until it is almost impossible to do so any longer. At that point, it gets rolled into a rope and then individual pieces of candy are cut and wrapped in wax paper.

Even though taffy now can be made by machine and turned into all sorts of delicious flavors, I still like the thought of joining a set of peers for one of those old-fashioned parties. Can you imagine what fun conversations might have occurred at a party like this? Or who would have been eyeing whom, hoping to get paired up with that person? I enjoyed imaging this very scenario while writing A Lumberjack for Christmas, a mail-order bride story that released earlier this month as part of the Spinster Mail-Order Brides multi-author series. Not only did Molly, my female protagonist, who married Brandt Troonedale dream up and then organize this fun activity, showing her new husband that she’s the kind of person who goes after what she wants, but several younger characters paired up. It was fun to put different characters together and see how they would interact. I imagine that I will someday revisit this small town of Pine Ridge, Arizona, and create more stories that take place there!

For this one, though, Molly Crismon has decided to leave her home in New York without her father’s knowledge and marry a lumberjack with two small children. However, when she arrives in Pine Ridge, she discovers that the man she was supposed to marry is at death’s door after a horrendous accident. Good thing his best friend, Brandt, is able to step in and take his place, even if that isn’t exactly what Brandt wants to do. He had hopes of following the next logging job down in South America. However, neither Molly nor Brandt expect Molly's father and former beau to suddenly show up and make demands of their own. Will Molly and Brandt be able to provide a wonderful Christmas for these two orphans? Will their hearts knit together in love by then?

 

You can find out the answers to those questions by reading A Lumberjack for Christmas, available here. Which then leaves only one more question to be answered:  what is your favorite flavor of taffy?

DO AUTHORS HAVE FAVORITE CHILDREN...ER, STORIES?

They say that parents should never have a favorite child.  It’s the same for an author. Our minds are constantly occupied with ideas that seem to nag us to death until we get them down on paper, then relief comes—for a little while, at least—before another idea bombards us. This is true for me most of the time. But there are a few novels that I’ve written where the main characters were so stubborn, they refused to speak to me—or to each other. These stories were not my favorites to tell, by any means, even though they actually turned out surprisingly well considering how much trouble they caused me.

Why am I mentioning this? Because this summer I’ve had the opportunity to revisit one of my all-time favorite fictional couples, two former Pinkerton detectives who were perfect for each other, and who worked so well together, they could practically finish each other’s sentences. Their names are Chas (short for Charles) and Jessica Bryant. Their story began in Virginia when Chas, a Pinkerton agent working out of Denver, recovered some stolen items from President George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate on America’s West Coast and then was sent back East to return them. There, a woman by the name of Jessica Flanders was having trouble of her own. She and her sister, Amaryllis or Amy, as she’s called, who was much younger than Jessica, had just become orphaned and Jessica’s ability to take care of her sister was being called into question by authorities. Thank goodness Chas stepped in at just the right time to help her keep Amy, and Jessica was able to help him catch a pair of murderers who had tried to weasel their way into full ownership of a successful horse-breeding operation. You may have read this story already, but if you haven’t, you can find it in An Agent for Jessica as part of The Pinkerton Matchmaker series.

Fast forward seven years. Amaryllis is sixteen years old now, and her best friend, Sarah, was engaged to marry a wealthy rancher from Denver. But at the last minute, Sarah decided to marry her friend from childhood, Mark Wilson. This was part of the plot in An Agent for Sarah, which released last month, and if you read it, you know there will be sparks flying in the next installment because now it’s Amy’s turn for a happily ever after. But not until she’s abducted first. Who should come to her rescue but none other than her nemesis, Sarah’s former fiancé, Derrick Baldwin?

Amy and Derrick don’t see eye to eye on a lot of things. Will they work together to find whoever is responsible for salting a mine and forging signatures on assayers’ certificates? Because of the nature of the story, and with it following parameters that were already set in Sarah and Mark’s story, An Agent for Amaryllis is quite a bit different than most of The Pinkerton Matchmaker stories that you’ve already read. (If you haven’t read any yet, might I recommend this multi-author series to you? It really is a fun one!) For one thing, due to a threat on her life, Amaryllis is forced to go into hiding. Quite conveniently, Derrick owns a “guest ranch” (another name for dude ranch) several miles out of town, so it’s the perfect place to keep watch over her.

With this being a historical romance, however, and societal rules being what they were in 1878, chaperones are needed. Naturally, I chose Amy’s guardians, Chas and Jessica, along with their three young sons, to step into this role. What follows is a spark-filled romance and merry chase as Amy and Derrick put the clues together to capture the bad guys and realize they hold strong feelings for each other. These characters were so fun and easy to write, their conversations just flew off the page. Amy and Derrick, along with Chas and Jessica, are admittedly among my favorite of favorites as far as my own literary couples go.

 

A couple of fun facts about this story:

1) According to my research, dude ranches didn’t come into existence until the 1880s, so I moved the timeline for them up a bit to fit the plot for An Agent for Amaryllis. 

2) One way that miners used to salt mines was to place a small gold nugget at the end of a gun and shoot, letting fragments of gold splatter against the mine's walls. This sounds like the original version of paintball shooting.

I hope you’ll be ready to continue the saga of the Flanders, Bryant, and Packard families when An Agent for Amaryllis releases on July 10, 2020. These three books have been very rewarding to write. These characters feel so real to me, almost like family. I hope you enjoy their stories.