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Salted Almonds
Shell and blanch the required amount of almonds, for every half-pound allowing three tablespoons of Larkin Olive Oil. Heat the oil in a frying-pan or the blazer of a chafing-dish to blue heat, and put in the almonds. Gently stir until all are equally brown. Take from pan and place upon absorbent paper. When the paper has absorbed the excess of oil, sprinkle them with salt. Cool and serve cold.
A straightforward fried nut, but the original's heat cue is the one thing worth translating before you start.
- "Blue heat"An old shorthand for fat hot enough to shimmer and just begin to haze; the recipe gives no temperature, and how hot the phrase was meant to signal is not fixed. Taken literally as blue smoke, olive oil is at or past its smoke point and will taste acrid. Heat until a test almond sizzles steadily on contact and no further.
- Larkin Olive OilA house brand sold by the Larkin Company of Buffalo, whose premium catalogue this book supported. Any mild olive oil works; a robust extra-virgin will dominate the almonds.
- BlanchingPour boiling water over shelled almonds, stand two minutes, drain, and the skins slip off under thumb pressure. Dry them thoroughly on a towel before they meet hot oil, or the pan will spit.
- ProportionsThree tablespoons of oil to half a pound of almonds is a shallow fry, not a deep one. Keep them in a single layer and stir more or less constantly — the pan is small enough that the nuts on the bottom will color first.
- When to stopAlmonds carry over considerably off the heat. Pull them at pale gold, not the full brown the recipe describes, or they will be bitter by the time they cool.
- SaltingSalt while still warm and glossy so it adheres; fine sea salt or popcorn salt clings better than coarse crystals, which slide off into the bottom of the dish.
- The chafing dishThe "blazer" is the upper pan of a chafing dish, set directly over its spirit lamp. A heavy skillet over moderate heat does the same job with better temperature control.
- Yield and keepingHalf a pound serves eight to ten as a cocktail or dinner nut. Cooled completely, they keep a week in an airtight jar; refrigerate beyond that, as the oil goes rancid before the nut goes stale.
Salted almonds were a fixture of the formal American table around 1900, set out in small individual dishes at each cover alongside olives and celery, to be nibbled through the early courses. They were a marker of a certain kind of hospitality — inexpensive in themselves, but requiring shelling, blanching and frying by hand, which is to say requiring someone's labor. This particular version comes from a book issued in the orbit of the Larkin Company, the Buffalo soap-and-household-goods firm that built an enormous mail-order business on premiums, and the branded olive oil in the first line is doing quiet advertising work. Frying nuts in oil rather than roasting them dry gives a crisper, more evenly browned result and gives the salt something to hold onto.