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NOUGATS (a la Francaise)
For dessert. Prepare the nougat as in the last recipe. If preferred, pistachio kernels may be used instead of almonds, and the sugar may be coloured with cochineal, and flavoured with vanilla. When the paste is ready, spread it out on an oiled slab to the thickness of a quarter of an inch, strew coloured sugar or nonpareil comfits on the surface, mark it into oblong shapes, and cut it before it is cold. It should be stored in a tin box in a dry place until wanted for use, and should be served, piled up prettily, on a napkin.
This is the hard almond brittle sort of nougat — nougat sec — not the white aerated kind, and it depends on the preceding recipe in the book for the base: blanched almonds folded into caramelised sugar. The single thing that governs success is speed once the paste leaves the pan.
- Cut it hot, or not at allMarking and cutting must happen while the sheet is still pliable, within a minute or two of spreading. Once it has cooled and set hard it will shatter along random lines instead of the ones you scored.
- The sugar stageThe book gives no temperature; a pale caramel of this sort falls in the caramel range, around 320F in modern terms. Under-cooked it stays tacky and will bend in storage; much over and it turns bitter and dark.
- The oiled slabA marble or granite slab is ideal because it draws heat evenly; oil it thinly with a neutral oil or almond oil. A silicone baking mat works and needs no oil, though it cools more slowly, which is to your advantage here.
- Nonpareil comfitsThese are the tiny hard sugar spheres now sold as nonpareils or hundreds-and-thousands. Strew them the moment the sheet is spread — they need the surface still sticky to adhere.
- CochinealThe period colouring was carmine extracted from cochineal insects, still sold as carmine or E120. It is a food colour and perfectly usable; any red food colouring gives the same effect, but a paste or gel adds less water to hot sugar than a liquid.
- PistachiosBlanch and skin them, and warm them before they go into the sugar. Cold nuts chill the caramel and stiffen it before you can spread it.
- Quarter of an inchAbout 6 mm. Spread with an oiled rolling pin or offset palette knife rather than trying to pour it level.
- Storage and yieldStorage -- Humidity is the enemy — the sugar goes sticky within hours in a damp kitchen, so an airtight tin with a sheet of parchment between layers is not optional.
Nougat in nineteenth-century English cookery books usually meant one of two things, and this entry is the harder of them: sugar taken to caramel and bound with nuts, closer to what French confectioners call nougat sec or croquant than to the soft, egg-white and honey nougat de Mont ame is generally traced through Provençal nougat to a Latin root meaning nut-cake, and Provence remains the region most associated with it. The instruction to serve it "piled up prettily, on a napkin" places this squarely in the dessert service of a formal Victorian dinner, where small dry confections went to the table alongside crystallised fruit and bonbons as part of the final course. The recipe is marked "a la Francaise" because the whole technique — the oiled slab, the coloured sugar, the geometric cut — belongs to the French confectioner's craft that English kitchens of the period were busily imitating.