Peanut Brittle
1 quart roasted peanuts 1 pound granulated sugar Shell the peanuts; remove the skins and roll them or run them through the meat chopper. Melt the sugar over the fire; add the peanuts; mix and turn out on a greased marble slab or large greased tin. Roll quickly with an ordinary rolling pin that has been well greased; cut into squares and break apart.
A two-ingredient brittle with no butter, corn syrup or soda, which makes it a dry caramel — fast, unforgiving, and hard as glass. Everything depends on getting the melted sugar off the heat before it darkens past amber.
- The hinge: melting sugar dry"Melt the sugar over the fire" means a dry caramel with no water added. Use a heavy pan over medium heat, let it liquefy at the edges first and stir only as it comes together; pull it at deep amber, around 340-350F. Sugar goes from amber to burnt in under a minute and there is nothing to dilute it.
- How much peanutA quart is measured before shelling, so expect somewhere around 1 to 1 1/2 cups of nutmeat (roughly 6-8 oz) from a quart of peanuts in the shell; the figure varies with the size of the nuts. Pre-shelled roasted peanuts work: use about that weight, and skip straight to chopping.
- Skins and choppingRub the roasted nuts between your palms or in a towel to loosen the papery skins, then winnow them off. A food processor pulsed a few times replaces the meat chopper; stop while the pieces are still coarse or you will have peanut paste.
- Warm the nutsCold nuts drop the temperature of the caramel on contact and it stiffens before you can spread it. Hold the chopped peanuts in a low oven, 200F, until you need them.
- The slab and the rolling pinMarble is ideal because it draws heat out quickly, but a greased rimmed baking sheet is the usual modern substitute. Grease both sheet and pin generously, and roll immediately — the recipe says "quickly" for good reason, as the window before the mass sets is very short.
- Cutting versus breakingScore into squares with a greased heavy knife while the sheet is still hot and pliable, then let it cool fully and snap along the lines. Left to set completely uncut, this recipe gives shards rather than squares.
- Texture, and why it differs from modern brittleWithout baking soda there are no air bubbles, so this is dense and glassy rather than light and porous. It is also harder on teeth than commercial brittle; roll it thin.
- Yield and keepingRoughly 1 1/2 lb of candy, enough to fill a 9x13 sheet rolled thin. Store airtight with parchment between layers; humidity turns dry caramel sticky within a day or two.
Peanut brittle belongs to the wave of cheap sugar-and-nut candies that spread through American kitchens as the peanut moved from Southern field crop and street-vendor snack to national grocery item in the decades either side of 1900. This version is about as bare as the form gets: no glucose, no butter, no soda, just sugar taken to caramel and a quart of nuts — essentially the same technique as a praline or a nut toffee — and it is judged by feel and colour rather than by a thermometer, since none is mentioned. The instruction to roll the mass on a marble slab echoes professional candy work, marble being favoured because it pulls heat out of sugar fast.