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Lychee Nougat
Oriental lychee nuts are worth playing around with, too, in some such thing as a nougat where you boil 2 cups of sugar with 1/2 cup each of corn syrup and water, remembering not to stir and taking it off the flame at the hardball stage. Beat 2 egg whites stiff and whip in 2 teaspoons of cold coffee, then pour your hot syrup on slowly, beating strenuously until everything is velvety smooth for finishing off with 1/2 cup each of shredded lychee nuts and pecans, or walnuts, or anything you say. Beat the nuts in until your nougat is stiff and heavy and spread it out to cool in a buttered pan.
Lychees alone make a big hit around the campfire or anywhere that eating goes on outdoors, just as the poet said-a bag of lychees, a jug of cider and thou beside meah, wilderness! You don't have to go to Chinatown for lychee nuts anymore, as many of the big grocery stores handle them. And if there's a nut store handy it's a good idea to stock up on some of the usual and unusual crunches that take so little room in the rucksack and kill a lot of time in camp-such as pine nuts, or Indian nuts, the bigger the better, and they grow pretty big in Nevada cones. Or take along paradise nuts for a change. The name is no exaggeration; they are, indeed, a little taste of heaven on earth, yet they sell for the same price as "nigger toes." Their texture and flavor is truly celestial and they come in a satiny brown shell that makes you want to crack them with your teeth, no matter what the dentist told you.
This is a standard Italian-meringue nougat with dried lychee folded in; the syrup temperature and the beating are the whole job.
- Hard-ball stageHard ball is 250-266F (roughly 121-130C) on a candy thermometer. Below that the nougat stays sticky and will not hold a cut edge; above it the candy turns brittle.
- Why not to stirStirring a boiling sugar syrup throws crystals up the pan wall and can seed the whole batch grainy. Swirl the pan if you must, and wash down the sides once with a wet brush before the syrup comes to temperature.
- "Lychee nuts" are fruitThese are dried lychees, sold whole in shell or already shelled, not a true nut. Shredding means slicing or tearing the leathery dried flesh; if only fresh or canned lychee is available it carries too much moisture for nougat and will weep into the candy.
- BeatingPouring hot syrup into egg whites by hand is punishing. Use a stand mixer with the whisk, pour the syrup in a thin stream down the side of the bowl, then keep beating on medium-high for 8-12 minutes until the mass is thick, glossy and no longer warm to the touch.
- The coffeeTwo teaspoons of cold brewed coffee is flavour and colour only; it will not affect the set. Strong cold espresso gives more of it.
- Pan and cuttingAn 8-inch square pan, buttered and lined with parchment, gives a slab about 3/4 inch thick. Press it level with buttered hands or a buttered spatula, let it firm several hours at room temperature, then cut with an oiled knife.
- HumidityNougat is hygroscopic. On a damp day it will stay tacky no matter how accurate the thermometer; wrap the finished pieces individually in wax paper and keep them airtight rather than in the open.
- YieldSomewhere around a pound and a half of candy, depending on how much water boils off, or roughly three dozen small squares.
- Nut names"Paradise nuts" are sapucaia, a Brazil-nut relative rarely sold now; the slur in the original text was a common period name for Brazil nuts. "Indian nuts" are pinyon pine nuts. Any pecan, walnut or pine nut works in the same half-cup measure.
Nougat of this kind descends from the Mediterranean honey-and-nut confections that became Italian torrone and French nougat de Montelimar; the American version substitutes corn syrup and cooked sugar for honey and leans on an egg-white meringue for its chew. What dates this page is the lychee. Dried lychees had reached the United States through Chinese grocers from the nineteenth century onward, and the author's remark that you no longer need to go to Chinatown for them marks the moment when such imports were beginning to appear on general supermarket shelves. The surrounding chatter about nut-store stock for the rucksack belongs to a mid-century vein of outdoor cookery writing that treated camp food as an occasion for novelty rather than mere provisioning, and the casual racial epithet for Brazil nuts is a reminder of how unremarkable such language was in print at the time.