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Almonds, Candied
Blanch some almonds and fry them in butter or oil until they are nicely browned. Drain and dry them. Boil half a pint of water with half a pound of sugar, and bring it to the candying point--that is, boil until the sugar adheres to the finger and thumb, when a little is taken between them and opened. The finger and thumb must first be dipped in cold water. Pour this, boiling hot, upon the almonds, and keep on stirring till cold. Time, half an hour. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. per pound.
A sanded praline rather than a smooth glaze: the syrup is poured hot over the nuts and stirred until it crystallises into a dry, frosty coating. Knowing that is the difference between success and a sticky lump.
- The hinge: keep stirring past the point it looks wrongAs the syrup cools on the almonds it will turn cloudy, grainy and awkward. That is the intended result — continuous stirring forces the sugar to crystallise as a dry sandy shell. Stop early and you get a single welded mass.
- Half a pint of waterCassell's is imperial: half a pint is 10 fl oz, about 285 ml. With 8 oz (225 g) sugar that is a thin syrup, and the stated half-hour covers the whole operation, boiling and stirring alike.
- "Candying point" in numbersThis is one of the old pre-thermometer checks; it corresponds roughly to somewhere in the soft-ball to firm-ball range, perhaps 240-250F (116-121C), though the recipe names no temperature. A thermometer is easier, and safer than testing boiling syrup between the fingers as directed.
- Butter or oilButter browns and burns well below the point at which almonds colour through. Clarified butter or a neutral oil holds up; watch closely, as almonds go from golden to acrid in under a minute.
- BlanchingThirty seconds to a minute in boiling water, then the skins slip off between finger and thumb. Dry the nuts thoroughly before they meet hot fat.
- Yield and keepingKeeping -- The recipe gives no almond quantity, so the finished weight depends on how many nuts you fry. Spread them out to cool completely and store airtight; humidity turns the sugar coating tacky within a day or two.
- The price line1s. 6d. per pound is a Victorian cost note for the finished sweetmeat, useful only as period detail; almonds were an imported and comparatively costly ingredient.
Sugared almonds are among the oldest of European sweetmeats, descending from the medieval and Renaissance comfit, in which nuts, seeds or spices were coated in successive layers of sugar — a confectioner's speciality long before domestic cooks attempted it. This version, with its fried nuts and a syrup stirred to a sandy crust, is closer to the French pralin, generally traced in tradition to a seventeenth-century French household and later industrialised at Montargis. Its appearance in Cassell's reflects a Victorian confidence that sugar-boiling was a skill any competent household cook should master: the book expects its reader to judge a syrup by feel, with no thermometer assumed.