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Sugared Walnuts
1 C brown sugar 1/2 C water 1 quart walnuts, shelled Vanilla-Mapleine Cook until mixture makes a soft ball. Add one t vanilla and five drops Mapleine When candy has reached the soft ball stage (using a large surface pan), place walnuts over the bottom of pan while candy is very hot. Then sprinkle with salt, slightly, and stir with a fork until all is cool. Finish by using some powdered sugar. 1 C sugar 14 C molasses 1 T vinegar Mrs. Mary E. Boyle.
A sugar-frosted nut, made by the crystallization method rather than a clear glaze. Two things decide the outcome: the syrup temperature and the fact that you keep stirring as it cools.
- Soft ball means 235-240FUse a candy thermometer; a cup of sugar in half a cup of water reaches this in a few minutes of boiling. Below it the coating stays sticky, above it the sugar seizes before the nuts are coated.
- The hinge is the stirringStirring the hot syrup as it cools is what forces it to grain into an opaque, crumbly white coating. If you leave it alone you get a glassy shell instead. Keep the fork moving until the nuts separate and feel dry.
- MapleineA maple-flavoured extract sold by the Crescent Manufacturing Company and common in kitchens of this era; it was cheaper than real maple. It was highly concentrated, so the five drops called for is well under 1/4 teaspoon; substitute a few drops of maple extract, or a little real maple syrup added with the vanilla.
- A quart of shelled walnutsNuts were measured by volume then. That is about 4 cups, roughly 14 oz or 400 g of halves and large pieces.
- "Large surface pan"A wide, shallow pan or a rimmed baking sheet, not a saucepan. The syrup needs to spread thin so it cools fast and coats evenly; a deep pan pools it under the nuts.
- Toast firstNot in the original, but 8 minutes at 350F before they meet the syrup improves walnuts considerably.
- The stray line at the end"1 C sugar, 14 C molasses, 1 T vinegar" (presumably 1/4 C molasses) appears to be a fragment of a different recipe that has run on here. It has nothing to do with the sugared walnuts; ignore it.
- Yield and keepingSomething over a pound of finished nuts. Store airtight once fully cool; the sugared coating softens and turns tacky in humid air.
Sugared or "frosted" nuts of this kind belong to the church-supper and Christmas-box tradition rather than to fine confectionery: the same boiled sugar syrup that frosted a cake would, cooled with stirring instead of spread, coat a bowl of nuts. The Mapleine is the period's giveaway. It was a synthetic maple flavouring marketed heavily from Seattle in the early twentieth century and widely adopted in Midwestern home kitchens as a substitute for expensive maple syrup.