Nut Candy
Make sugar candy by one of the foregoing receipts, but instead of pouring it into a dish, drop it at intervals over a buttered dish. On each bit of candy thus dropped, lay half the kernel of an English walnut, and when a little cool, pour half a spoonful of sugar candy on top. Candy of almonds, pecans, or palm nuts may be made by the same recipe.--Mrs. S. T.
This is a drop-candy method rather than a full recipe: it depends entirely on the boiled sugar syrup given in the preceding entries of the book. Everything hinges on the sugar being at the right stage and on working quickly once it is.
- The stage of the sugarThe receipt gives no temperature; you have to go back to the foregoing sugar candy receipts for the boiling stage. Modern practice for drops of this kind is the hard-crack stage, around 300F on a thermometer: syrup taken much below that tends to stay tacky and slump, and taken much above it begins to color and taste scorched.
- Work fast, and off the heatOnce the syrup comes off the burner it thickens within a minute or two. Have the buttered surface, the nut halves and a spoon lined up before you start, and set the pan in a bowl of hot water if it stiffens before you have finished dropping.
- "A buttered dish"Any cold, flat, greased surface works: a marble slab, the back of a sheet pan, or a silicone mat.
- Half a spoonful on topThe second pour is what locks the nut in place. Add it while the base drop is still glossy but no longer runny -- the recipe's "when a little cool" -- or the two layers will not fuse.
- English walnutThe ordinary walnut sold today. The distinction mattered in Virginia, where the native black walnut was far more common and much stronger in flavor; it can be substituted but will dominate the sugar.
- Palm nutsAn imprecise nineteenth-century term whose exact reference here is unclear. Pecans, almonds or hazelnuts are the practical substitutes.
- Toast the nuts firstNot in the original, but ten minutes at 350F sharpens the flavor of pecans and walnuts and drives off moisture that would otherwise soften the candy from the inside.
- Yield and keepingStore them in a tin between layers of waxed paper; humidity turns them sticky within a day in an open dish.
Nut-topped sugar drops belong to a family of simple pulled and poured sugar sweets that were within reach of any household with a good stove and a heavy pan, and they appear in American cookbooks throughout the second half of the nineteenth century under names like nut candy and pralines. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, gathered contributions from a network of Virginia housewives, and the initialled attribution here -- Mrs. S. T. -- is typical of the book's method: hundreds of short receipts credited to named or half-named women rather than to a single author. The instruction to build on "one of the foregoing receipts" is equally typical of the period, when a cookbook assumed you had read the page before and did not repeat a sugar-boiling method it had already given.