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Hickory Nut Candy
2 cups sugar 1/2 cup water lemon or vanilla extract 1 cup hickory nut meats Boil sugar and water, without stirring, until thick enough to spin a thread; place saucepan in cold water; add flavoring and stir quickly until white; stir in nuts; turn into flat buttered tin; when cold cut into small squares.
This is a quick sugar fondant loaded with nuts — closer to a white pralines or Mexican-style patience candy than to a fudge. Success turns almost entirely on temperature and on when you start stirring.
- The hinge: stir at the right momentWhen to stir -- The recipe says to set the pan in cold water and stir quickly. Modern fondant practice is to let the syrup cool to lukewarm (around 110-120F, cool to the back of a finger against the pan) before beating hard until it turns opaque and thick: stirring a very hot syrup gives coarse, gritty crystals, while leaving it too long gives a mass too stiff to spread.
- Spins a threadThe old thread test means a drop of syrup pulls a fine strand from a spoon, usually put at roughly 230-235F on a candy thermometer. Cooked toward the upper end of that range the candy sets firmer and cuts more cleanly; undercooked syrup tends to stay tacky.
- Wash down the panSince there is no corn syrup or cream of tartar here, stray sugar crystals on the pan wall will seed the whole batch. Cover the pan for the first two minutes of boiling, or brush the sides down with a wet pastry brush.
- Hickory nutsShagbark and shellbark hickory nuts are still gathered in the eastern US but rarely sold. Pecans are the closest relative and the standard substitute; black walnuts are stronger but work. The recipe does not call for toasting; if you do toast them, let them come back to room temperature so they do not chill the candy.
- Flavoring quantityThe recipe gives none. A teaspoon of vanilla, or half a teaspoon of lemon extract, is right for two cups of sugar. Add it during the cooling stage, not to the boiling syrup, where it evaporates.
- The tinA buttered 8-inch square pan suits this quantity. Spread fast — the mass sets within a minute or two — and score the squares while it is still slightly warm rather than trying to cut it cold and brittle.
- Yield and keepingAbout 1 pound, roughly 36 small squares. Stored airtight at room temperature it keeps a week or more; refrigeration makes it weep.
The New Royal Cook Book was one of the promotional booklets issued by the Royal Baking Powder Company, and its candy chapter reflects what an American home cook of the early twentieth century could actually make on a gas range: boiled sugar, a little flavoring extract, and whatever nuts the household had on hand. Hickory nuts were exactly that sort of ingredient — gathered rather than bought, shelled at the kitchen table over the autumn, and often said to have a flavor sweeter and more delicate than the pecan's. The technique here, cooking sugar to the thread stage and then beating it to a white cream, is the basis of fondant, and the same method underlies penuche and the New Orleans praline. Cracking hickory nuts is slow work, which is generally given as the reason they never became a commercial crop; the wood went to tool handles and smokehouses instead, and the nuts stayed a regional, home-kitchen pleasure.