Walnuts, Candied
INGREDIENTS. -Walnuts, clarified sugar, lemon, liqueur.
Skin the nuts after putting them in boiling water for a minute or so; after this, throw them into another pan of boiling water and boil till tender. Squeeze the juice of a lemon into a basin of lukewarm water, and put the walnuts in this. When cool, dry them, dip them in clarified sugar flavoured with a little liqueur, and lay them on a slab to dry.
A Victorian confectioner's sweetmeat compressed into four sentences, with no quantities and no temperatures. The whole thing hinges on what "clarified sugar" means and how hot it is when the nuts go in.
- Clarified sugarNot a modern glaze but sugar syrup boiled with a little water and clarified of its scum (period confectioners generally used egg white for this), then cooked on to a set degree. The recipe names no degree; a syrup not boiled far enough will stay tacky rather than drying hard on the slab as the instruction expects.
- The nuts are kernels, not whole walnuts"Skin the nuts" means the papery brown skin on shelled halves, which carries most of the bitterness. A minute in boiling water loosens it enough to rub off with a cloth, though it is fiddly work and walnut halves break easily.
- "Boil till tender"Read this conservatively. Two or three minutes is enough to soften the kernel; beyond that the nut waterlogs, loses its snap, and will not dry properly under a sugar coat. Some period versions intend green, unripe walnuts, which genuinely need long boiling, but the skinning instruction points to ripe kernels.
- The acidulated waterLemon juice in lukewarm water keeps the blanched kernels from darkening while the rest are done. Drain and dry them thoroughly on a cloth before dipping, as the recipe directs; a wet nut dropped into hot sugar will spit and can seize the syrup.
- LiqueurAdd it off the heat and sparingly, as the recipe's "a little" implies, or the alcohol and extra liquid soften the set. Liqueurs of the period included maraschino, curaçao and noyau; brandy or rum would serve.
- The slabA marble slab, lightly oiled, or in a modern kitchen a silicone mat or oiled baking parchment. Space the nuts so they do not touch, and leave them at cool room temperature until hard, an hour or so. Humidity is the enemy; on a damp day the coating never sets crisp.
- Quantities and yieldNone are given; the entry assumes a cook who already knew the proportions.
- Handling hot sugarBoiled sugar syrup is far hotter than boiling water and clings to skin. Drop the nuts in with a fork or dipping wire rather than fingers, and keep a bowl of cold water at hand.
Candied and glacé nuts belonged to the dessert course, the sweetmeats, fruit and nuts set out after the cloth was drawn, and they were as much decoration as food: arranged in a pyramid or a glass dish alongside crystallised fruits and bonbons. The technique is straight confectioner's work, the same boiled-sugar dipping used for glacé cherries and marrons glacés, which is why the entry assumes so much and explains so little; it sits in an alphabetical compendium as a reference note for a cook who already understood degrees of sugar. Walnuts were grown in English gardens and orchards, and the ripe nuts came in autumn, some months after the midsummer pickling of green walnuts. The liqueur flavouring, noyau and maraschino especially, is a characteristically nineteenth-century touch.