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Peanut Brittle
Shell and chop roasted nuts to measure 1 pint. Put 2 pounds granulated sugar in clean frying-pan. Stir over slow fire. It will lump, then gradually melt. When pale coffee color and clear, add nuts and pour quickly on buttered tin sheet. Roll thin as possible. When cold break up.
This is a dry caramel brittle — no water, no corn syrup, no baking soda — so the whole dish turns on how you handle the melting sugar. Everything must be ready before the sugar goes on the heat, because the window between pale coffee color and burnt is under a minute.
- Quantities in modern termsA pint of chopped roasted peanuts is about 2 cups, roughly 10 to 12 oz. Two pounds of granulated sugar is about 4 1/2 cups. The finished slab runs close to 2 1/2 lb of candy.
- The hinge: dry caramelMelting sugar alone means it will clump into hard lumps before it liquefies, exactly as described. Keep the heat genuinely low and keep stirring; the lumps dissolve into the melted sugar around them. Rushing the heat scorches the melted portion while the lumps are still solid.
- Judging the color"Pale coffee color and clear" is roughly light amber; on a thermometer that falls somewhere around 340-350F, though the recipe works by eye and gives no temperature. Caramel keeps darkening off the heat, so pull it a shade lighter than you want. Once it smells sharp and smokes, it is bitter and cannot be rescued.
- Pan choiceA heavy skillet — cast iron or thick stainless — rather than a thin nonstick pan, which will scorch in patches.
- Warm the nutsCold nuts drop the temperature of the caramel and stiffen it before you can pour. Warm them in a 250F oven while the sugar melts, and have them beside the stove.
- Buttered tin sheetA rimmed baking sheet, generously buttered, or a silicone mat. Butter a rolling pin or the back of a metal spatula as well and spread the mass immediately; the window for rolling it thin is very short.
- No soda means no foamMany modern brittle recipes add a spoon of baking soda at the end, which aerates the syrup and gives the light, snappable texture most people expect. Without it you get a dense, glassy, distinctly harder candy.
- StorageBreak the cold slab into pieces and keep it airtight at room temperature. Humidity turns brittle sticky within hours; do not refrigerate.
Peanut brittle belongs to the large family of cheap boiled-sugar candies that spread through American kitchens as refined granulated sugar became inexpensive in the later nineteenth century, and as peanuts — grown widely in the South and sold roasted by street vendors — became a common household ingredient. The dry-caramel method here is the simpler technique: sugar and nothing else, cooked in a frying pan over the range, requiring no candy thermometer, only a cook's judgment of color. Baking soda, which turns the same syrup into the porous, easily bitten brittle sold commercially today, became common in printed recipes later, though its absence is not by itself a reliable way to date a version. The appeal of such candies was that a pound of sugar and a handful of nuts made a great deal of candy for very little money.