In the novel, the widow Ellis suggested that her friends, Elisa and Susan Brownlow, spend an afternoon with her pulling cream candy.

The taffy-like mixture of sugar, butter and vanilla extract is still sometimes made at home, though it was more common in the Nineteenth century when store-bought anything was expensive.

Amanda Worthington, a teenage Mississippi Delta “belle,” whose diary favorably compares with that of the older and more worldly Mary Boykin Chesnut, frequently mentions pulling the butter-and-sugar candy as a pastime for society men and women in the years before and during the war.