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Nut Bars
½ cup flour 1/8 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons English walnut meat, finely chopped Halves of walnuts or almonds Caramelize two tablespoons sugar, add butter and water, and boil two minutes. Remove from fire, add remaining sugar, flour mixed with salt, and walnut meat. Spread as Rolled Wafers, crease in two-inch squares, and decorate with nut meats. Bake in a slow oven, and remove from pan at once.
White 1 egg 1 cup brown sugar
The text as printed here has been scrambled — the ingredient list is broken up and part of it (egg white, brown sugar) has fallen to the bottom, while butter and water are called for in the method but never quantified. Read the method for technique and expect to work out proportions yourself.
- Missing quantitiesThe recipe directs you to "add butter and water" but no amounts appear anywhere in the text. The original figures are simply not recoverable from this page; you will have to judge them yourself.
- The full ingredient listReassembled, it is 1½ cup flour, 1/8 teaspoon salt, 1 egg white, 1 cup brown sugar, 2 tablespoons finely chopped walnuts, butter and water in unstated amounts, plus walnut or almond halves for the tops. The method as printed never says where the egg white goes; the likeliest point is with the sugar after the pan comes off the fire.
- Slow ovenBy later convention roughly 300F. These are thin, sugar-heavy sheets and the caramel already in them browns fast; a hotter oven scorches the edges before the center sets.
- Caramelizing two tablespoons sugarMelt it dry in a heavy pan until it is the color of a copper penny, then add the butter and water — it will seize and hiss, which is expected. Boiling two minutes redissolves the hardened caramel into a smooth syrup.
- "Spread as Rolled Wafers"Farmer's rolled wafer method: spread the batter very thin and even over a buttered inverted pan or baking sheet, right to the edges. An offset spatula does in seconds what the original expected of a knife blade.
- Crease before bakingScore the two-inch squares in the raw batter with the back of a knife. The sheet is too brittle to cut cleanly once baked.
- Remove from pan at onceThis is the hinge. The sheet is pliable for perhaps thirty seconds out of the oven and sets to glass after that. Have a spatula and a rack ready before you open the door, and if a batch hardens, return it to the oven for a moment to soften.
- YieldThe recipe gives no figure; it depends entirely on how thin the sheet is spread. They keep well in a tin but go soft in humid weather.
Nut bars sit in the wafer end of Fannie Farmer's cookie chapter, among the rolled and spread batters — thin sheets handled hot, in the manner of a confectioner's tuile or a Florentine. The dry-caramelized sugar is what distinguishes them: browning sugar in a bare pan before liquid goes in was a familiar nineteenth-century technique, used for coloring gravies and soups as much as for sweets, and it gives a faint bitterness that plain brown sugar cannot. The specification of "English walnut" distinguishes the milder Persian nut from the native black walnut, which was stronger-flavored and far harder to shell. The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book went through repeated printings and revisions from 1896 onward, and long ingredient lists set in narrow columns transcribe badly, as this page shows.