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Peanut Nougat
1 lb. sugar 1 quart peanuts Shell, remove skins, and finely chop peanuts. Sprinkle with one-fourth teaspoon salt. Put sugar in a perfectly smooth granite saucepan, place on range, and stir constantly until melted to a syrup, taking care to keep sugar from sides of pan. Add nut meat, pour at once into a warm buttered tin, and mark in small squares. If sugar is not removed from range as soon as melted, it will quickly caramelize.
A dry caramel poured over chopped peanuts — closer to what we would call peanut brittle or a praline slab than to a chewy nougat. Everything depends on catching the sugar the moment it liquefies.
- The hinge: pull the pan the instant the sugar is fluidDry sugar liquefies at a high heat and begins to darken within seconds of doing so. Have the nuts, the buttered tin and a bench scraper or knife within reach before the pan goes on the heat, because there is very little pause between melted and burnt.
- "Granite saucepan"Granite ware is speckled enamel over steel — a thin, light pan. Use a heavy stainless or enameled cast-iron pan instead; thin metal scorches dry sugar in patches. Nonstick is best avoided, since a dry-sugar pan can run hotter than the coating is meant to take.
- Stirring dry sugarConstant stirring is right for the dry method, unlike a water syrup. Keep the grains off the sides of the pan as instructed, and expect the sugar to clump before it runs clear.
- A quart of peanutsThe measure is taken before shelling, so it is genuinely imprecise; a quart of in-shell peanuts will not give much more than a cup or so of kernels, though the exact yield varies with the size of the nuts. Something in the region of 1 to 2 cups of shelled, skinned, chopped nuts to 1 lb sugar.
- Warm the nuts and the tinWarm the tin -- The book calls for a warm buttered tin for good reason: a cold pan chills the caramel and makes it set before it has levelled out. Warming the chopped nuts as well is not in the recipe, but will do no harm.
- Marking the squaresScore the surface within about a minute of pouring, while the slab is still pliable, then break along the lines once cool. Left to set fully it will shatter irregularly.
- Yield and keepingKeeping -- Store airtight; dry caramel takes up moisture from the air and turns sticky within a day in a humid kitchen.
"Nougat" in American cookbooks of this period covered a wide range of sugar-and-nut confections, from the whipped-egg-white French nougat de Montélimar to plain slabs like this one, where the only binder is melted sugar. The dry-caramel method here reflects a kitchen without a thermometer: the cook judges doneness entirely by sight, which is why the recipe ends with a warning rather than a temperature.