Caramel Popcorn Day

What the day is

Caramel Popcorn Day is observed on April 6. The snack is popped corn coated in cooked sugar and baked or tumbled until the coating sets crisp rather than sticky.

Origin and background

The origin of the observance is not documented. The snack's own history in America runs through Chicago, where the Rueckheim brothers, German immigrants, were selling a caramel-coated popcorn and peanut mixture in the late nineteenth century. The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, the same fair that introduced the Ferris wheel, gave it an enormous audience.

The commercial problem they solved was clumping. Caramel-coated popcorn tends to fuse into a solid block in the package, and the process they developed kept the pieces separate, which is what made it sellable in boxes. A prize in every box followed in the early 1910s and became the product's defining feature, and the brand was fixed in American memory by a line in the 1908 song Take Me Out to the Ball Game.

The home cook's version of the same clumping problem has a neat solution. Stirring baking soda into the hot caramel just before coating makes it foam: the bubbles lighten the coating so it spreads thinly and shatters when bitten, instead of setting into a dense shell that welds the kernels together and threatens fillings.

How to take part

• Remove unpopped kernels before coating. Biting one in a caramel cluster is how teeth get broken.
• Add a half teaspoon of baking soda to the hot caramel and stir; it will foam up pale, which is what you want.
• Pour over the popcorn in a very large bowl and fold quickly, since the caramel stiffens fast.
• Bake it low, around 120 degrees Celsius, for the best part of an hour, stirring every fifteen minutes. This is what makes it crisp rather than chewy.
• Cool it spread out on parchment, breaking up clusters as it sets.
• Store airtight. Caramel corn goes soft within hours in humid air.