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Chocolate Peanut Brittle
1 1/2 cups of sugar, 2/3 a cup of water, 1/2 a cup of pure corn syrup, 2 level tablespoonfuls of butter, 1/2 a pound of raw shelled peanuts, 1 teaspoonful of vanilla extract, 1 level teaspoonful of soda, 1 tablespoonful of cold water, 1/2 a pound or more of Baker's "Dot" Chocolate.
Put the sugar, water and pure corn syrup over the fire; stir till the sugar is dissolved; wash down the sides of the saucepan with a cloth or the fingers dipped in cold water, cover and let boil three or four minutes, then uncover and let cook to 275 degree F. (when a little is cooled and chewed it clings but does not stick to the teeth) add the butter and peanuts and stir constantly until the peanuts are nicely browned (or are of the color of well roasted peanuts). Dissolve the soda in the cold water, add the vanilla and the soda and stir vigorously. When the candy is through foaming, turn it onto a warm and well-oiled marble or platter. As soon as it has cooled a little on the edges, take hold of it at the edge and pull out as thin as possible. Loosen it from the receptacle at the center by running a spatula under it, then turn the whole sheet upside down, and again pull as thin as possible. Break into small pieces and when cold coat with "Dot" Chocolate prepared as in previous recipes. Half of a roasted peanut may be set upon each piece as coated. Note that the peanuts used in the brittle are raw. The small Spanish peanuts are the best for this purpose. After the peanuts are shelled, cover them with boiling water, let boil up once, then skim out and push off the skin, when they are ready to use.
A standard pulled brittle with an extra step: every piece is hand-dipped in chocolate. The candy itself moves quickly once the peanuts go in, so have the oiled slab, spatula and soda solution ready before you start.
- The hinge: 275F is not the finishThe syrup goes to 275F, but the raw peanuts then cook in it until they brown, which carries the batch well past hard-crack. Judge by the colour and smell of the nuts rather than the thermometer at that stage, and pull it the moment they look like roasted peanuts — a few seconds more and the sugar tastes scorched.
- Raw peanuts, and whyThe recipe means it. Raw Spanish peanuts roast in the syrup and flavour it as they go; already-roasted nuts will burn before the candy is done. Raw shelled peanuts come from health-food shops and Asian groceries. The boiling-water blanch loosens the papery skins, which otherwise turn bitter and speckle the brittle.
- Baker's "Dot" ChocolateA sweetened coating chocolate from Walter Baker & Co., no longer made; the trade name suggests it came in small drops ready for dipping. Use about 8 oz of good dark couverture, tempered, or a compound coating if you would rather not temper. "Prepared as in previous recipes" points back to the book's earlier dipping instructions, which would have meant melting gently over warm water rather than direct heat.
- Soda and the foamOne level teaspoon of baking soda in a tablespoon of water, stirred in hard, aerates the candy and is what makes it snap rather than shatter like glass. It foams up sharply, so use a saucepan several times the volume of the syrup.
- Pulling the sheetButtered hands or clean cotton gloves; the candy is still very hot when it is soft enough to work, which is why the recipe says to start at the edges as soon as they have cooled a little. If it sets before you have thinned it, a few minutes in a low oven on the oiled slab will soften it enough to stretch again.
- Marble, or what you haveA marble slab is ideal because it draws heat evenly. A heavy rimless baking sheet, oiled and warmed in the oven, does the job; a cold sheet sets the edges before you can lift them.
- Washing down the panFingers dipped in cold water was the period method and works, but a pastry brush kept in a cup of water is easier and safer. The point is to dissolve stray crystals on the pan wall so the batch does not turn grainy.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 lb of brittle before dipping, closer to 2 lb coated — roughly forty to fifty pieces. Store the finished pieces in a tin between layers of paper; humidity turns the exposed sugar sticky within a day.
Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, one of the oldest chocolate firms in the United States, published a long series of small recipe booklets as advertising, and this one belongs to the era when the company was pushing "Dot" chocolate, a sweetened coating sold in ready-to-melt drops for home confectioners. The recipes read like a candy-school curriculum because they largely were: Baker's booklets of this period were compiled with the help of professional cooking-school teachers, and the book even cross-references "previous recipes" for the dipping chocolate. Peanut brittle itself is often said, by tradition rather than documentation, to have come out of the American South in the second half of the nineteenth century, when cheap groundnuts and cheap cane syrup met; the soda trick is what makes it porous. Coating each shard in chocolate is the confectioner's flourish that lets it sit in a box at Christmas, and, not incidentally, sells more chocolate.