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Deviled Almonds
Melt one tablespoon butter in chafing dish. Add one tablespoon chopped red pepper, one tablespoon onion, one half teaspoon salt, and one cup blanched almonds. Cook until almonds are brown.
A chafing-dish nibble from the era when nuts were browned at the table rather than in the oven. It works on a stovetop in any small heavy skillet, but the moisture in the fresh vegetables changes how it behaves.
- The chafing dishA chafing dish is a shallow pan over a spirit lamp or hot-water bath — gentle, uneven heat meant for tableside cooking. A small heavy skillet over medium heat does the same job, and considerably faster; watch the nuts rather than the clock.
- "Chopped red pepper"In cookbooks of this period "red pepper" alone often meant cayenne, but "chopped" and a full tablespoon point to fresh sweet red pepper, chopped fine — a tablespoon of ground cayenne would be inedible. If you want heat, a pinch of cayenne added at the end is closer to the intent of "deviled" without wrecking the balance.
- The hinge: moistureFresh pepper and onion release water, and almonds will not brown while they are steaming. Cook the pepper and onion in the butter until the pan is dry and they begin to catch, then add the almonds; otherwise you get pale, soft nuts and a scorched aromatic base.
- Blanched almondsSkinned whole almonds, sold as "blanched" today. If starting from raw skin-on almonds, cover with boiling water for one minute and slip the skins off, then dry them thoroughly before they meet the butter.
- Judging donenessAlmonds carry on cooking off the heat and go from golden to bitter quickly. Pull them when they are a shade lighter than you want and turn them straight out onto paper or a cold plate.
- SaltHalf a teaspoon for a cup of nuts is modest by modern taste, and much of it clings to the pepper and onion rather than the almonds. Salt again after draining while the nuts are still hot and glossy.
- Yield and servingOne cup of almonds serves four to six as a drinks nibble. Serve warm — the butter congeals as they cool, and cold, they taste greasy rather than rich.
- KeepingThis does not preserve. The fresh onion and pepper make it a same-day dish; refrigerate leftovers and eat within a day or two.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer — one of many turn-of-the-century cookbooks published by a food firm to promote its product, though the book ranges far beyond chocolate. "Deviled" had by then settled into its familiar English sense of something made hot with pepper and mustard, a usage generally traced to the late eighteenth century and applied indiscriminately to kidneys, ham, biscuits and nuts. That this appears as a chafing-dish recipe is telling: between roughly 1890 and 1915 the chafing dish was a fashionable piece of equipment for college rooms, bachelor apartments and after-theatre suppers, and publishers turned out whole volumes of recipes for it. Salted and spiced almonds belonged to the same social moment — small, savoury, made in front of guests, and eaten with a drink.