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Salted Peanuts
In buying peanuts for salting, get those which have not been roasted. Remove skins and fry same as Salted Almonds I or II.
A cross-reference recipe: the whole method lives in the Salted Almonds entries, which fry blanched nuts in oil or butter and salt them hot. A few things worth knowing before you start.
- Buy raw, not roastedThe instruction still holds. Raw (unroasted) peanuts, usually sold shelled and skin-on, are the right starting point, because the frying is the cooking; nuts already roasted are likely to overcolour and taste scorched.
- Getting the skins offUnlike almonds, raw peanut skins do not need long blanching. Cover with boiling water for a minute or rub the nuts briskly in a dry towel and winnow away the papery skins. Dry them thoroughly before they meet hot fat.
- The fat and its temperatureSalted Almonds I fries in olive oil or butter; II bakes in a shallow pan with oil. Whichever you follow, keep the fat only moderately hot: peanuts colour fast, and can go from pale gold to scorched in under a minute.
- Pull them earlyThe hinge of the recipe. Peanuts keep cooking in their own heat after they leave the pan, so lift them when they are a shade lighter than you want. Drain on paper and spread in a single layer rather than heaping them.
- Salt while hotFine salt sprinkled the moment they come out of the fat sticks to the surface film of oil. Salt applied to cooled nuts falls straight to the bottom of the dish.
- Oven versionIf you prefer the second method, toss the nuts in a spoonful or two of oil and bake in a shallow pan in a moderate oven, stirring every few minutes, until they are lightly coloured. The original gives neither temperature nor time.
- Yield and keepingThe original gives no quantity. Cooled completely and sealed in a tin, they will keep a week or two before the oil begins to taste stale.
Salted almonds were the fashionable nut of the American table, and the cookbook gives them two full methods. Peanuts get a single sentence because they were the cheap substitute: a Southern field crop, long associated with plantation labour and with street vending, that only became respectable parlour food in the later nineteenth century as commercial roasting and the growth of the peanut trade after the Civil War pushed them north. The brevity of the entry is itself the history lesson: the peanut gets no instructions of its own, only permission to be treated like an almond.