Peanut Candy
1 pound of sugar. 8 ounces of peanuts.
Make the peanuts hot in the oven. Set the sugar over the fire in a kettle to melt without any water. Stir it a little. When it is all melted and of, the color of golden syrup or light molasses mix in the peanuts, pour the candy into a buttered shallow pan and when nearly cold cut it into strips and blocks.
Hickory nut and almond candy is made in the above manner, and will be better with a pound of the nuts instead of half a pound. In the same manner with a pound of grated cocoanut a brown variety may be made to match the white and red cocoanut caramels (called also cocoanut cakes and cocoanut gems) described at number 151. Nougat is the French name of nut candies made by melting the sugar without water as in the foregoing receipts.
Nougat Baskets-Corbeilles de Noix.
The hickory nut, almond, pecan, or cocoanut candies made as directed for peanut candy may be pressed while cooling into basket shapes of tin or crockery ware, and sticks and twists of the same placed for handles and borders. Very small baskets formed in fancy gem pans are used to fill with strawberries or other articles for ornamental purposes on set supper tables. For this purpose the proportion of nuts may be increased to 1 1/2 or even 2 pounds to 1 pound of sugar.
This is dry-caramel nut brittle under its French name, and it depends on one thing: the sugar is melted with no water at all. Everything else is timing.
- The hinge — dry caramelSugar melted alone scorches at the pan bottom long before the top has liquefied, so use a heavy pan over moderate heat and stir only enough to move the melted syrup over the dry crystals. "The color of golden syrup or light molasses" is roughly 340–350F; past that it turns bitter fast, and it will keep darkening off the heat.
- Why the peanuts go in the ovenCold nuts drop the caramel's temperature and it stiffens before you can spread it. Warm them at 300F for 10 minutes; they should be hot to the hand when they hit the sugar. This also drives off moisture and improves the snap.
- QuantitiesA pound of sugar is about 2 1/4 cups; 8 ounces of peanuts is about 1 1/2 cups. The recipe yields roughly a pound and a half of candy: an ordinary brittle thickness in an 8x8 pan, thinner if spread over a quarter-sheet.
- Nut ratiosThe recipe's own note that hickory nuts and almonds are better at a full pound is the author's preference, given without a reason. At the 1 1/2 to 2 pounds of nuts suggested for baskets the mixture is barely held together and must be shaped immediately.
- CocoanutGrated cocoanut here means fresh or unsweetened dried coconut, not the sweetened flake sold today. Sweetened flake adds sugar and moisture and will make the caramel weep.
- Cutting"Nearly cold" is a narrow window — score it while still flexible, around the point where the surface no longer marks under a finger. Fully cold, it shatters rather than cuts.
- Basket shapesTin or crockery moulds must be buttered heavily and warmed slightly, or the candy sets against a cold surface and cracks. Gem pans are the period's muffin tins; sizes varied, and the small fancy ones the recipe calls for are in the range of a modern mini-muffin cup.
- StorageCaramel of this kind is hygroscopic and turns tacky in humid air. Keep it airtight with the pieces separated by parchment, not stacked.
The author is right that nougat once covered this kind of sweet: before the word settled in English on the white, whipped, egg-white confection of Montélimar, French pastry books used it for nuts bound with cooked sugar, and nougat noir — almonds in dark caramel — is still made that way in Provence. What makes this entry distinctly American is the peanut, which was cheap, plentiful and sold roasted by street vendors in the later nineteenth century, and which turns up here in a role that had previously assumed almonds. The corbeilles, baskets of caramelised nuts moulded over tinware and filled with strawberries, belong to the same era's taste for edible table architecture.