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Peanut Nougat
1 lb. sugar 1 quart peanuts Shell, remove skins, and finely chop peanuts. Sprinkle with one-fourth teaspoon salt. Put sugar in a perfectly smooth granite saucepan, place on range, and stir constantly until melted to a syrup, taking care to keep sugar from sides of pan. Add nut meat, pour at once into a warm buttered tin, and mark in small squares. If sugar is not removed from range as soon as melted, it will quickly caramelize.
This is a dry-caramel nut candy — closer to French nougatine or a peanut praline than to the white, egg-white nougat the name suggests today. The whole recipe turns on one moment: the sugar is done the instant it has all melted.
- Off the heat immediatelyMelted granulated sugar can go from clear syrup to dark caramel very quickly. Pull the pan the moment the last crystals disappear — the recipe gives no temperature — and have the nuts and tin already at hand; there is no time to prepare anything once the sugar is liquid.
- The panA "granite saucepan" is graniteware, enamel fused to thin steel. It heats unevenly and scorches sugar. Use a heavy stainless or copper pan; the instruction to keep sugar off the sides still applies, since dry crystals clinging above the melt will brown before the rest.
- A quart of peanutsThe recipe has you shell them after measuring, so the quart was probably peanuts in the shell. How much kernel that yields is uncertain, so weigh or judge by eye rather than trusting a fixed conversion.
- Roasted, not rawRoasted peanuts suit this better: raw ones will not cook through in the brief contact with molten sugar. Warming them in a 300F oven for a few minutes keeps them from chilling the caramel on contact.
- Warm the tinButtering is not enough — a cold pan sets the candy before it can spread. A quarter-sheet or 8-inch square tin, buttered and left in a low oven while the sugar melts, gives you time to press the mass flat with a buttered offset spatula.
- Marking the squaresScore with an oiled knife while the sheet is still pliable, within a minute or two of pouring. Once fully cool the candy snaps along the lines; if you wait too long it shatters at random.
- SaltThe quarter teaspoon sprinkled on the nuts is the only seasoning and matters more than it looks, since a pound of sugar is otherwise flat. If your peanuts are already salted, leave it out.
- Yield and keepingStore airtight with a sheet of parchment between layers; caramel picks up humidity quickly and turns sticky in a damp kitchen.