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Hickory Nut Candy
One cup of molasses, two cups of hickory nut meats, one tablespoon of butter. When nearly done add a little soda.
— Mrs. Price H. Perry
This is a molasses nut brittle compressed into three lines, and it assumes you know how to boil sugar by eye. The hinge is the temperature at which you stop: everything else is assembly.
- The stage that matters"Nearly done" points to the syrup approaching the hard-crack stage, roughly 300-310F on a candy thermometer, or a drizzle into cold water that snaps rather than bends; the soda goes in just short of that. Stopped nearer 250F it will be a chewy taffy instead, and pushed much beyond hard-crack the molasses begins to scorch and taste acrid.
- How much soda"A little" here is about 1/4 teaspoon for one cup of molasses. It reacts with the acid in the molasses and foams the syrup up dramatically, which lightens the finished candy and makes it easier to bite. Have it measured and ready, stir it in fast, and expect the pan volume to double for a moment.
- Pan sizeUse a heavy saucepan at least three times the volume of the syrup. Molasses boils high on its own and the soda pushes it higher still.
- MolassesUse unsulphured dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter at candy concentrations, and not the sulphured supermarket cooking molasses if you can avoid it.
- Hickory nutsShagbark hickory nuts are still gathered in the Catskills but are rarely sold; they are laborious to crack and worth toasting lightly first. Pecans are the closest supermarket stand-in, being the same genus, and black walnuts give a sharper, more assertive result.
- Butter and the panThe recipe does not say when the butter goes in; adding it with the molasses at the start works well, and the fat keeps the mass from setting up quite so glassy. Butter the pouring sheet as well, or line it with parchment; this candy sticks stubbornly to bare metal.
- FinishingStir the nuts in off the heat immediately after the soda, pour at once onto the buttered sheet, and let it set until firm before breaking it into pieces with the back of a spoon. Do not spread it thin with a spatula once it starts to stiffen or it will tear.
- YieldAbout a pound of candy. Stored airtight it keeps a week or two; in humid weather it goes tacky within a day.
Hickory nut candy belongs to the American tradition of nut brittles made with molasses rather than refined sugar, which was the cheaper and more available sweetener in rural households through most of the nineteenth century. Shagbark hickory grew freely across much of the country, and the nuts were a gathered rather than a purchased ingredient. The soda trick, adding a pinch of saleratus or baking soda at the end of the boil, was standard in molasses candies of the period and shows up in taffy and popcorn-ball receipts as well. Community cookbooks like this one, collected under headings such as "Village Receipts" and signed with the contributor's married name, were typically compiled to raise money for a church or a library, and they preserve exactly this kind of shorthand: instructions written by a cook who assumed her neighbors already knew what the finished candy should look like.