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Peanut Brittle
1/2 C sugar Put sugar in frying pan. When sugar is all melted pour on back of greased pan on which are the peanuts.
Two lines of instruction covering a dry caramel, with no quantity given for the nuts and no thermometer in sight. It works, but the timing is unforgiving.
- The hinge: watch the color, not the clockDry-melted sugar goes from clear amber to burnt in well under a minute. Pull the pan the moment it is an even medium amber, roughly 340-350F, and pour immediately; the residual heat in the pan keeps cooking it.
- "Back of greased pan"This means the inverted underside of a baking sheet, greased and strewn with peanuts. The flat surface with no rim lets you pour a thin sheet and snap it off cleanly once cold. A greased marble slab or a silicone mat does the same job.
- Quantity of peanutsThe original gives none. Half a cup of sugar will coat only a modest quantity of nuts, on the order of half to three-quarters of a cup of roasted, skinned peanuts, in a thin layer; much more than that and the caramel may not bind them.
- Melt it dry and undisturbedNo water, no corn syrup. Use an even layer of sugar over medium heat in a heavy skillet, and swirl the pan rather than stirring, which drags unmelted crystals up the sides and causes graining.
- Warm the nutsCold peanuts chill the caramel on contact and it sets before it spreads. Warm them in a low oven while the sugar melts.
- No soda, so this is hard candyCommercial brittle gets its porous snap from baking soda stirred in at the end. Without it you get a dense, glassy praline sheet that must be cracked with a knife handle rather than snapped.
- CleanupSoak the skillet in hot water rather than scraping. Set caramel will dissolve given a long soak, or by filling the pan with water and bringing it to a simmer.
Peanut brittle belongs to a broad family of nut candies made by pouring caramelized sugar over nuts, a technique European confectioners applied to almonds and hazelnuts long before peanuts were cheap. Peanuts became an everyday American pantry item in the decades after the Civil War, as Southern acreage expanded and roasted goobers were sold from street carts. The extreme brevity here is typical of contributions from cooks who assumed everyone already knew what melted sugar looked like when it was ready.