Home › Honey, Ices and Gelatines › Walnut Creams
Walnut Creams
Boil to the hard snap stage 1 cup of grated chocolate, 1 cup of brown sugar, 1 cup of extracted honey and 1/2 cup of sweet cream.
When it hardens on being dropped in water, stir in butter the size of an egg. Just before removing from the fire, add 1 teaspoonful of vanilla and 2 cups of finely chopped walnuts. Stir thoroughly and pour on buttered plates to cool, cutting it into squares. Other kinds of nuts may be substituted for walnuts.
A honey-and-chocolate nut candy, closer to a hard toffee than the soft "cream" its name suggests. The whole recipe hangs on one temperature.
- "Hard snap stage"Not a standard term; it appears to correspond to what modern candy makers call the hard crack stage, in the region of 300-310F (149-154C). The cold-water test in the original works: a drop spooned into cold water should set hard and snap rather than bend. A thermometer clipped to the pan is easier, but check it in boiling water first.
- Grated chocolateIn a book of this date that means a solid block of unsweetened or barely sweetened baking chocolate, grated so it dissolves. One cup grated is roughly 4 oz. Modern semi-sweet chips will work but push the candy noticeably sweeter, since the honey and brown sugar already carry it.
- Extracted honeyHoney spun out of the comb, i.e. ordinary liquid honey. It is specified to distinguish it from comb honey, which was still commonly sold and would not measure by the cup.
- Sweet creamFresh unsoured cream, not cultured or soured. Use heavy or whipping cream. "Sweet" here means not sour, not sugared.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. The recipe stirs it in while the pan is still on the fire; expect the mixture to spit as the cold butter's water flashes off, so add it in pieces and stand back.
- Scorching is the real riskHoney, milk sugars and chocolate solids all darken and burn below the temperature this syrup has to reach. Use a heavy-bottomed pan with plenty of headroom, keep the heat moderate and stir as the mixture thickens. A scorched batch is hard to save.
- Pouring and cuttingButtered dinner plates work, but a buttered quarter-sheet pan or a silicone mat is easier. Score the squares while the slab is still warm and pliable, then break along the lines once cold. Left to set hard first, it shatters at random.
- Yield and storageRoughly 1 3/4 lb of candy, about 40 small squares. Keep it airtight; honey candy draws moisture from the air and turns tacky within a day in a humid kitchen.
That this appears under "Honey, Ices and Gelatines" rather than among the confectionery says something about how early twentieth-century American cookbooks were organised: honey was treated as a subject in its own right, with its own chapter. The name "walnut creams" is loose by modern standards, since nothing here is a cream in the fondant sense; the label attached to everything from soft centres to hard nut brittles.