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Peanut Brittle
Shell, measure and chop a quart of nuts. Measure an equal portion of granulated sugar. Put sugar in saucepan over the fire, gently shaking until sugar is entirely dissolved. Put the nuts on a buttered tin and pour dissolved sugar over it. Cool and break into squares.
This is a dry-caramel brittle: no water, no corn syrup, no baking soda. It sets hard and glassy rather than light and porous, and the whole thing hangs on how you handle the sugar.
- The hinge: melting sugar drySugar alone in a heavy pan over medium heat will melt, but it scorches the instant it is neglected. Shake and swirl the pan rather than stirring, and pull it off the heat the moment it is uniformly amber, around 340F. Past that point it turns bitter and no amount of nuts will hide it.
- Quart of nutsA quart is 4 cups, which is roughly 1 1/4 lb of shelled peanuts. "An equal portion" means equal by volume, so 4 cups of granulated sugar, about 1 lb 12 oz. That is a sugar-heavy ratio by modern taste.
- Roast and skin the peanutsThe recipe does not say whether the nuts are raw or roasted, and raw peanuts will not toast appreciably in the residual heat of the caramel. Roast them at 350F for 10-12 minutes and rub off the papery skins first; the flavor difference is considerable.
- Warm the tin and the nutsCold nuts on a cold sheet chill the caramel on contact and it stops flowing before it covers anything. Spread the warm nuts on a buttered rimmed sheet and keep them in a low oven until the sugar is ready.
- Working speedYou have only a very short window once the caramel hits the nuts. Pour in a ribbon across them and spread with a buttered offset spatula or the back of an oiled spoon; do not try to smooth it twice.
- No soda, no liftModern brittle recipes add 1/2 teaspoon baking soda to aerate the candy and make it snap. This one has none, so expect a dense, hard sheet closer to nut praline than to bagged peanut brittle.
- Cooling and breakingGive it 30 minutes at room temperature until fully set, then lift and crack it rather than trying to cut squares. Butter, not oil, on the tin makes release easier; parchment or a silicone mat is easier still.
- Yield and storageAbout 3 lb of candy, enough for a large tin. Keep it airtight and away from humidity, which will make the surface tacky within a day.
Good Things to Eat (1911) was written by Rufus Estes, born enslaved in Tennessee in 1857, who cooked for the Pullman Company's private railcars before moving to a subsidiary of U.S. Steel, in its Chicago laboratories. His is one of the earliest cookbooks published by an African American chef, and its dessert chapter is full of exactly this sort of compact, unfussy sweet: cheap, keepable, and practical for a kitchen that had to produce candy without a candy thermometer. Peanuts were an inexpensive Southern crop still working their way from fodder and street food toward respectability in printed cookery, and brittle made from nothing but nuts and melted sugar was the plainest possible use for them. The dry-caramel method Estes gives here, with no corn syrup or soda, is the plainer technique rather than necessarily the older one: soda-leavened candy with its aerated, pale snap was already in use by the late nineteenth century.