Toffee

This really really made me miss home. But it also made me glad to be learning 

so much about British culture, habits and food :)

Toffee also reminded me of some caramel
sweets we have in Brazil. There, we call
them "puxa-puxa"

Origins

   Apparently, the word “toffee” was first published in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1825. According to it, toffee is “a kind of firm or hard sweet which softens when sucked or chewed, made by boiling together sugar and butter, often with other ingredients or flavourings added”. It is said that the word was a variation of taffy, which is a very similar sweet.

   Another important reference to toffee origin is made in “On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen”, written by Harold McGee. It is a book that provides references to the history of food and cookery, but also analyses flavours, textures and molecular components of the ingredients. In his comment, McGee says that the word “toffee” comes from a Creole language, and is used to describe a mixture of sugar and molasses.

   Anyway, even though toffee’s recipe origin is unknown, it is possible to say that this sweet got really popular during the 19^th century, especially because slave labour made sugar and treacle quite accessible.

My tasting experience

   This time, I kind of already had expectations about toffee. That’s because I have heard a lot about it when I lived in the U.S. last year, and also because its colour and shape reminded me of “doce de leite”, a typical sweet in Brazil.

   I bought a small package of original toffee at a Thorntons’ store during my trip to Liverpool. From what I had looked up on-line, it was a great store for buying them. I only opened the package a few days later though, during a reading afternoon at home. The toffee pieces were quite big, but I just went into it anyway.

   So far, I think it has been my favourite tasting on the blog. Toffee is very sugary, but at the same time, it is not too sweet – I guess all the butter it contains breaks it a little. I also liked it because it reminds me of home:  it IS actually similar to “doce de leite”, even though it’s more tough and less creamy.

So many options, so many memories

   As usual, I did a brief research on Google to see what I would find about toffee. I got really surprised on how many results would be websites for stores that sell it and how many different options they offer. There’s toffee with almonds, nuts, chocolate, treacle, liquorice, banana, mint… And they might be soft, hard or even unbelievably sugar-free.

   It is also curious how many factories advertise their toffee as being homemade. They tend to value the fact that it is an old recipe, and there’s usually a story about that recipe that relates to the history of the company or its owner. Another curious aspect is their description for the ingredients: they always use the freshest milk, the softest nuts, the creamiest butter. They also make use of traditional graphic elements to complement the text and the idea of classic toffee. You can check these elements out in websites such as The Toffee Shop, Walker's Nonsuch and Thorntons.

Toffee nosed?

   Searching through the internet, I found out that there is a very popular expression in British English called “toffee nosed”. It is similar to “posh”, and can also mean snobbish, supercilious or stuck-up. Sadly, the toffee part has nothing to do with the sweet. It comes from the slang “toff”, used long ago by the lower-classes in Victorian times to designate stylish upper-class gentlemen.

   I have also encountered with the phrase “not for toffee”. It is usually used when one person is absolutely incompetent at doing a particular action, as in “Those girls can’t sing for toffee”.