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Nut Chocolate Caramels
To Chocolate Caramels add the meat from one pound English walnuts broken in pieces, or one-half pound almonds blanched and chopped.
This is a variation, not a standalone recipe: it assumes you have the Chocolate Caramels recipe from the same chapter in front of you. A few notes on scale, timing and terms.
- Read the base recipe firstEverything that governs success belongs to the Chocolate Caramels entry this variation refers to. This page only tells you what to stir in.
- When to add the nutsThe recipe does not say when. General candy practice is to stir the nuts in late, once the syrup is at temperature and off the heat, just before pouring; added earlier they are more likely to scorch and to knock the boil about.
- "Meat from one pound English walnuts" is ambiguousIf that is a pound in the shell you will get roughly half a pound of meats; if it is a pound of shelled halves you have twice as much nut. The parallel with half a pound of almonds suggests the writer meant nuts in the shell. Half a pound of meats is the safer reading for a standard batch.
- English walnutsThe ordinary Persian walnut sold everywhere today; the name is generally understood in American usage to set it apart from the stronger native black walnut.
- Blanching almondsThirty to sixty seconds in boiling water, then drain and pinch the skins off while warm. Dry them thoroughly on a towel and in a low oven before chopping, or the water will spit in the hot syrup.
- The cooking stage, in numbersMany period caramel recipes use the cold-water test; caramels that cut cleanly and chew rather than shatter correspond to firm ball, about 245-250F. Below that they slump; carried higher they chew progressively harder.
- Pan and cuttingPour into a buttered shallow pan or onto a buttered marble slab. Score into squares with an oiled knife while the sheet is warm and still yielding, then break along the lines once fully cold.
Chocolate caramels were one of the great American confections of the late nineteenth century, and they arrived in home cookbooks by way of the commercial candy trade — Milton Hershey's first successful business was a caramel company, and he moved into chocolate bars only afterward. Cookbooks of the period treated candy-making as a normal domestic skill, with fudge, fondant, nougat and molasses candies each followed by short variations like this one. The pattern of building a plain sweet and then folding in a pound of nuts reflects thrift; it may also reflect a teaching method, giving cooks a reliable base and letting them vary it rather than memorize dozens of separate formulas.