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Candies and Candy Making: Nougat
To Make Ordinary Nougat. - Blanch, drain, and skin 1 pound of almonds, and let stand until thoroughly dry before chopping or shredding them. Place the shredded almonds on a pie plate just inside an open oven door and dissolve in a copper sugar boiler 10 ounces of granulated sugar, stirring with a wooden spoon until it begins to melt. Stir Strain through cheese cloth and whip.constantly until the sugar comes to in about 3½ ounces of Confectioners' XXX sugar. Place on a moderate fire and beat for of an hour, or until it comes to a stiff froth.
Remove from the fire, beat 2 or 3 minutes while cooling and stir in½ teaspoonful of vanilla. Dust a tin pan with cornstarch, pour in the marshmallow, dust cornstarch over the top and set aside to cool.
When cold cut into squares with a knife dipped in cornstarch, roll the squares in the starch and pack away in tin or other tight boxes.
NOUGATS - Nougats.
Nougat is made by melting in a copper sugar boiler granulated sugar with the addition of lemon juice at the rate of a dessertspoonful to each pound of sugar and twice the weight of the sugar in almonds or other nuts, as filberts, pistachios, and the like, with a little sweet liqueur. The almonds and other nuts should be blanched, drained, and skinned, and allowed to stand for some hours before being used.
They should then be placed just inside the oven door to heat them thoroughly, as they must be hot when put into the sirup. Nougat is used either to line molds or in the form of bars protected by layers of white wafer.
For lining molds the nougat should be pressed into the mold with a lemon until the inside is covered, and the edge of the mold should be trimmed with a sharp knife before it hardens, as it will then be brittle and likely to break. The mold should be oiled the pearl degree. Now add the almonds and stir them in. Have ready suitable molds oiled thinly with olive oil by means of a camel's-hair brush and pressing small pieces of the nougat into the mold with a piece of lemon until they are well coated.
Trim the edge of the mold with a sharp knife. Turn out the nougat as soon as it hardens.
Marseilles Nougat. -Melt 8 ounces of honey and remove the scum with a skimmer as fast as it appears. Boil to the crack degree 8 ounces of granulated sugar, stir in the melted honey and gill of orange-flower water, have ready in an egg bowl the whites of 3 eggs beaten to a stiff froth and pour into the egg bowl in a thin stream the melted honey and sirup, stirring constantly. Place the mixture over a slow fire and continue to stir.
While the paste is baking, which will require about 3 hours' constant attention, test by dropping a spoonful of the paste in cold water. If it is brittle enough to be broken across without bending, it is done.
Now stir in the almonds, lay out the white wafer on a molding board, ane on this spread the nougat about 1 inch deep. Cover with additional sheets of white wafer, lay a clean piece of white paper on top, and on this place a weight having a smooth surface, as a large weighted pan, to level it up. Let stand to cool and harden. Cut into any desired size, strips or bars, for use.
Parisian Nougats. - Boil to the crack 6 ounces of granulated sugar, CANDIES AND CANDY MAKING stir in 8 ounces of chopped pistachio kernels, a few drops of cochineal, and coloring and flavoring matter as desired. Spread out on a sheet of waxed paper, and while hot cut to any desired shapes and sizes with a sharp knife. This nougat may be dusted with granite sugar and cleaned currants if desired.
Peanut Nougat.-Boil to the crack 1 pound of granulated sugar, and stir in 1 quart of peanuts shelled, screened, and chopped fine, and sprinkled with teaspoonful of salt. Pour out on waxed paper or in a buttered tin and cut into bars for use.
Two quite different confections are gathered under one name here: a caramel-and-almond paste (what French confectioners call nougatine) used to line molds or cut into bars, and the honey-and-egg-white nougat of Provence. The temperatures are given as old-fashioned syrup "degrees", so those are the first thing to translate.
- Crack and pearl degreesThe "crack" in old syrup tables corresponds to roughly 290-310F on a candy thermometer. The "pearl degree" is far lower, around 220F, barely above boiling -- a syrup at pearl will not set hard, so anything meant to snap must go to the crack.
- Copper sugar boilerAn unlined copper pan with a pouring lip. Any heavy-bottomed saucepan works; heavy is what matters, since thin pans scorch sugar before the thermometer catches up.
- Warming the nutsThe instruction to heat the almonds just inside the oven door is the hinge of the molded nougat. Cold nuts drop the syrup's temperature on contact and it stiffens and grains before it can be pressed. Keep them warm in a low oven and add them hot, as the text directs.
- White waferEdible wafer paper, sold now as rice paper for nougat and torrone. It is still the standard backing for honey nougat and keeps the bars from welding to each other.
- Granite sugar and cochinealGranite sugar is coarse sanding sugar. Cochineal is carmine, still available as a natural red; a few drops go a long way and it is not vegetarian.
- Nut proportionTwice the weight of the sugar in nuts is very high — a pound of sugar to two pounds of almonds gives a stiff mass that must be worked fast. The "ordinary nougat" ratio, one pound of almonds to ten ounces of sugar, is closer to workable for a first attempt.
- Three hours over the fireThe Marseilles method cooks the honey-meringue paste slowly until a test spoonful snaps when cooled in water. Modern practice reaches the same point by cooking the honey and syrup to about 300F before whipping them into the whites, which takes minutes rather than hours and gives more consistent results.
- Molding and unmoldingPress the hot paste with a cut lemon rather than a spoon: the rind's oil keeps it from sticking and the fruit tolerates the heat. Trim the mold's edge while the nougat is still pliable, as the text says, and turn it out as soon as it sets — once fully cold it will crack rather than release.
- YieldThe peanut nougat is a pound of sugar to a quart of nuts; the recipe gives no yield or pan size, so cut the bars to suit whatever tin you use. Store all of these airtight; caramel-based nougat turns sticky quickly in humid air.
Nougat takes its name through Occitan nogat from Latin nux, nut, and the two families described here reflect a real split in the confectioner's trade. White nougat — honey, whipped egg white, almonds, pressed between sheets of wafer paper — is the specialty generally traced to Montelimar in the Rhone valley, where almond orchards were planted in the seventeenth century; the Marseilles version given here, with its orange-flower water, is a southern cousin of the same thing. The dark, brittle sugar-and-almond paste used to line molds is properly nougatine, a nineteenth-century French pastry material for building the ornamental bases and baskets that crowned formal desserts. That a general American household manual expected its readers to own a copper sugar boiler, a camel's-hair brush and a set of confectioner's molds says a good deal about home candy making around 1900, when commercial sweets were still expensive enough that ambitious households made their own.