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Peanut Brittle
2 cups shelled peanuts Melt sugar; when a golden brown, add chopped nuts; pour into hot buttered pan, crease, and cool.
A dry-caramel brittle: no water, no corn syrup, no soda. It is about as short as a candy recipe can be, and it leaves out the sugar quantity entirely.
- The missing measurementOnly the peanuts are quantified. Other brittles of the period vary in their sugar-to-nut ratio, so 2 cups of granulated sugar is one reasonable reading, but the original genuinely does not say.
- This is a dry caramelSugar melted alone, with no water or glucose, moves quickly from clear to golden to burnt at the end. Use a heavy pan over medium heat, stir only enough to break up lumps, and pull it off at the golden brown the recipe calls for. Residual heat keeps it darkening in the pan.
- Warm the nutsCold peanuts dropped into molten sugar chill it and stiffen it, making it hard to spread. Toasting them dry and adding them warm helps, and improves the flavour; the recipe appears to assume raw shelled nuts rather than roasted salted ones.
- Hot buttered panThe instruction to butter the pan hot is doing real work. Dry caramel with no syrup sets almost on contact, and a cold sheet stops it before it spreads. Heat the pan in the oven first, butter it, and pour.
- "Crease"Score the sheet into squares with a buttered knife while it is still pliable, perhaps 30 seconds after pouring. Wait longer and it will shatter along its own lines instead of yours.
- No soda means no foamModern brittles add baking soda for the porous, snappable texture most people expect. Without it this sets hard, dense and glassy — closer to a nut toffee than to supermarket brittle.
- HumidityUncoated caramel is hygroscopic. Made on a damp day it turns tacky within hours; store it airtight with the pieces separated, and do not stack it in a warm kitchen.
- YieldDepends on the unstated sugar; with 2 cups of sugar, roughly 1½ lb of candy in a thin layer.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer — one of a long line of cookbooks issued by food firms to put their product into home kitchens, and the reason its candy and dessert chapters are unusually detailed. Peanut brittle belongs to the American confectionery tradition that grew up around the peanut's rise from Southern field crop to national snack after the Civil War, when improved shelling and roasting made cheap shelled nuts more widely available in the North. Its origin is often attributed to a home cook's accidental substitution of soda in a taffy batch, a story with no documentary support; what is documented is that molten-sugar nut candies of this kind appear in American manuscript and printed cookbooks in the second half of the nineteenth century, sometimes under names such as "nut candy." That this version relies on nothing but sugar, nuts and a buttered pan places it in the era before corn syrup became the standard insurance against crystallisation.