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Carameled Nuts
Boil 1 cup sugar and 1/2 cup water to the crack, or to the caramel, as preferred; add a few drops of lemon juice. Blanch a few almonds and dry without coloring them. Drop 1 at a time into the sugar; turn the almond until well covered without stirring the sugar; lift it out with bonbon fork and place on oiled paper or slab. Do not drain the nuts when lifting them out and enough sugar will remain to form a clearing of candy around each one. English walnuts, filberts, or any other nut may be used in the same way. They should be warm, so as not to chill the candy. The work should be done quickly. If the sugar becomes hard before the nuts are done, return in to the fire to heat. Add 1 teaspoon water if necessary and boil to the right degree again. If the sugar is boiled to the crack, the candy will be without color; if boiled to the caramel, it will be yellow.
A confectioner's method rather than a home-cook's one: the whole thing turns on reading the sugar correctly and moving fast before it sets. A thermometer removes all the guesswork the original expects you to supply.
- "The crack" and "the caramel"Hard crack is 300-310F (149-154C), where the syrup is still water-white and sets glassy and brittle. Caramel begins around 320F and runs to about 350F, by which point the sugar has coloured and taken on a faint bitterness. The recipe is telling you to choose between a clear coating and an amber one.
- The lemon juiceA few drops of acid invert some of the sucrose and discourage the syrup from crystallising back into grain. Cream of tartar or a spoonful of corn syrup does the same job; do not add more than a few drops, or the finished coating will stay tacky.
- No stirring, everOnce the syrup boils, stirring drags sugar crystals off the pan sides and seeds the whole batch. Wash the sides down with a wet pastry brush early on, then leave it alone and swirl the pan if you need to even out the colour.
- Warm the nutsThe recipe is explicit that they should be warm, and it matters. Cold nuts chill the syrup on contact and it thickens into a lumpy shell instead of a thin clear one. Hold the blanched, dried nuts in a 200F oven and take them out a few at a time.
- Blanching almondsCover with boiling water for a minute, drain, and the skins slip off under thumb pressure. "Dry without coloring" means a low oven until the surface is dry but the nut is still pale, not toasted.
- Reheating the syrupThe syrup will stiffen well before you finish dipping. Return it to the fire as the recipe says, adding the teaspoon of water if necessary, and boil it back to the same degree; the reheating can be done several times before the sugar darkens too far to use.
- SurfaceAn oiled marble slab is ideal because it pulls heat away quickly. Lightly oiled parchment or a silicone mat both work; wax paper will fuse to hard-crack sugar.
- Yield and keepingThe recipe gives no nut quantity, only 'a few almonds', so work in small batches and judge by how heavy a clearing of candy you leave around each. Store airtight and away from damp -- hard-crack sugar goes sticky within hours in a humid kitchen.
Sugar-dipped nuts are one of the oldest branches of confectionery, descending from the medieval and early modern comfit, where almonds and spice seeds were coated in successive layers of boiled sugar. The technique here -- dipping single nuts on a bonbon fork and setting them on an oiled slab -- comes from the professional confectioner's bench. The distinction the recipe draws between 'the crack' and 'the caramel' is the old craft vocabulary of sugar boiling, in which each stage had a name tested by hand -- a thread, a ball, a crack -- long before household thermometers made the numbers routine.