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Nut Candies
MANY delicious candies may be made by adding nuts to the other ingredients and since nuts have much food value these candies are healthful and nourishing. CHOCOLATE ALMONDS Blanch a pound of almonds; this is done by pouring hot water over the almond meats and letting them stand on back of stove for about five minutes when the skins can easily be slipped off. Place on a pan in the oven and brown a nice dark brown, but be careful not to let them burn. When cool dip each almond in melted sweet chocolate.
BROWN ALMOND NOUGAT Blanch and cut one pound of sweet almonds in slices; lay them on a paper in a pan, and place in the oven until slightly brown. Take two cupfuls of granulated sugar, one-half cupful of golden corn syrup, and one teaspoonful of lemon juice. Melt to a liquid, stirring well, then add the almond and mix well with the syrup. Butter a large platter or marble slab. Pour the nougat on this and make it even with a lemon, which should be lightly dipped in oil or melted butter. Make it about an inch thick, and cut into strips or bars, or it may be used to line molds. The molds are first slightly buttered on the inside, then a thin layer of nougat is pressed against the form; this must be done while the nougat is still warm. When cool turn out of form or mold, and these may then be filled with candied fruit and whipped cream, candies or ice-cream. WHITE NOUGAT Boil two pounds of honey to the crack stage, or nearly to the crack, have the whites of four eggs beaten stiff, and add to the honey. Stir over a slow fire until it has reached the crack stage; then add two pounds of blanched almonds cut into strips and slightly browned in the oven. Mix all together and pour on platter or marble slab, or else line a nougat frame with wafer paper which can be bought at a confectionery shop, then pour the nougat into the frame, put board and weight on top.
PEANUT BRITTLE Take two cupfuls of light brown sugar, one cup of corn syrup, one-half cupful of water, one tablespoonful of butter and cook to the crack stage, then add a teaspoonful of vanilla, and two cupfuls of peanuts that have been slightly roasted, and stir until it begins to turn brown. Be careful not to let it burn, or become more than a golden brown in color. Add one tablespoonful (level) of soda, stirring it quickly, then pour over a greased platter or marble slab. As soon as it is thin enough to handle, loosen from the platter or slab with a knife, turn over and stretch out very thin. Break up into any desired shape when cold.
ALMOND TOFFEE Take two cupfuls of brown sugar, two tablespoonfuls of butter and one-half cupful of cream and boil to the hard ball stage; then add one cupful of chopped almonds and one teaspoonful of vanilla. Boil to the crack stage. Pour into buttered pans, and mark off into squares.
SOUTHERN HAZELNUT TOFFEE Melt one-half cupful of butter in a saucepan, add one cupful brown sugar and one cupful New Orleans molasses. Boil to the hard ball stage, add one cupful of chopped hazelnuts and boil to the crack stage. Pour into buttered pan, and mark off into squares.
MEXICAN PANOCHA Take two cupfuls of brown sugar, one-half cupful of corn syrup, one cupful of sweet milk, one teaspoonful of butter, and one square of chocolate. Mix the ingredients and boil to the hard ball stage, stirring the mixture constantly while on the stove. Add one cupful of pecan or any chopped nut meats, and pour into buttered pans. When cold cut into squares.
A chapter of sugar work rather than a single recipe, and nearly all of it turns on candy-thermometer accuracy rather than the visual cues the original assumes. Read the stage temperatures first; everything else follows.
- The stages, in numbersHard ball is 250-265F, and the crack (often called soft crack in later books) begins around 270F, with hard crack at 300-310F. For brittles and toffees that must snap, work to 300-305F; anything under 290F stays chewy and will weep in humid weather.
- Cook by thermometer, not by clockNone of these recipes gives a cooking time for the syrup, because the original cook tested cold-water drops. A clip-on digital probe is the modern equivalent. Calibrate it in boiling water first and adjust for altitude, subtracting about 1F per 500 feet above sea level.
- Oven for browning nutsThe book gives no temperature, only 'place in the oven and brown.' Modern practice for toasting nuts is 325-350F for 8-12 minutes, stirring once. Almonds sliced thin for nougat colour much faster than whole ones and can scorch very quickly at the end.
- Sweet chocolate, and tempering'melted sweet chocolate' is a dark eating chocolate, sweeter than modern bittersweet; a couverture in the roughly 45-55% range is a reasonable match. The book says simply to melt it, but untempered chocolate will usually bloom grey within a few days, so temper it or use compound coating if appearance matters.
- The lemon as a rollerOiling a lemon and rolling the hot nougat flat is a period trick that works because the fruit is cool, firm and disposable. An oiled rolling pin or an offset spatula does the same job; move quickly, as brown almond nougat sets hard within a couple of minutes.
- Soda in the peanut brittleA level tablespoon of baking soda in that quantity of syrup is a lot, and it is the hinge of the recipe: it foams the mass so it can be pulled thin and eats sharp. Stir it in for only a few seconds and pour at once, or the bubbles collapse and the brittle turns dense; the large dose can also leave a soapy taste if it is not evenly dispersed.
- White nougat and the egg whitesBeaten whites are added to honey already at or near the crack and then cooked further, so they are held well above any safe temperature; this is a cooked meringue, not a raw one. Pour the hot honey into the whites in a thin stream with the mixer running rather than dumping the whites into the pan, which is what modern method has settled on.
- Wafer paperStill sold as edible rice or wafer paper, now more often through cake-decorating suppliers than confectioners. It keeps the nougat from sticking to the frame and is eaten with the candy.
- New Orleans molassesA cane molasses of the middle grade, closer to today's ordinary dark molasses than to blackstrap. Blackstrap will make the hazelnut toffee harsh and faintly bitter.
- Panocha'one square of chocolate' is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate. For the fudge-like grain the name implies, let the mixture cool to lukewarm before beating it; poured hot and left alone it sets glassier.
- YieldsThe smaller recipes each give somewhere over a pound of candy, enough for a small buttered pan; the brittle is stretched on a slab rather than panned. Cut toffees and panocha while still warm, since scored squares break cleanly and cold slabs shatter at random.
These are the standard nut confections of the American candy shop as it stood in the early twentieth century, when corn syrup had become cheap and reliable enough to be a default ingredient in home sugar work rather than a professional trick. Nougat is the oldest thing here: the white honey-and-egg-white version descends from the Mediterranean tradition that gives Italy torrone and southern France nougat de Montélimar, while the darker almond-and-caramel type is the confectioner's nougatine, valued as much for lining moulds as for eating, which is why the recipe spends its last third on shaping cups to be filled with ice cream. Panocha (also spelled panoche, and, chiefly in New England, penuche) is conventionally said to take its name from Spanish for a coarse raw sugar loaf, with the word often traced northward alongside Mexican sugar into the American Southwest before the dish settled into its familiar brown-sugar fudge form. The chapter's opening line, insisting that nuts make candy "healthful and nourishing," is a period tell, written against the era's suspicion of commercial candy and its adulterants.