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Brown Sugar Candy
Two cups brown sugar; one cup of cream or rich milk; two cups of chopped walnut meats. Boil sugar and cream until it forms a thread. Remove from the fire and stir until it begins to cream. Add nuts and pour into buttered pans.
This is penuche in its plainest form: brown sugar, cream, walnuts. Everything depends on how far you boil the syrup and when you start stirring.
- "Until it forms a thread" is ambiguousThe classic thread stage is 230-235F, which is too loose for candy that must be cut from a pan. Penuche of this type needs the soft-ball stage, 236-240F on a thermometer, or a spoonful that gathers into a ball that flattens when lifted from cold water.
- Do not stir while it boilsStirring the syrup during the boil drags sugar crystals up the pan walls and seeds a grainy batch. Wash the sides down once with a wet brush, then leave it alone until it comes off the heat.
- Cool before you beatThe instruction to "stir until it begins to cream" works best if the pan first sits undisturbed until the syrup drops to about 110F. Beating a hot syrup gives coarse crystals and a sandy texture.
- Cream or rich milkPeriod "cream" varied a great deal in richness and was often thinner than modern heavy cream; half-and-half or whole milk is a safe reading and behaves well here. Scorching is the risk either way, so use a heavy-bottomed pan.
- Brown sugarUse light brown, packed. Dark brown works but the molasses flavour dominates and the finished candy stays softer.
- Pan and yieldAn 8-inch square pan, buttered, is about right; this makes two to three dozen small squares. Score it while still warm and cut through once set, as fully hardened penuche crumbles rather than slices.
- Toast the walnutsTwo cups of nuts to two cups of sugar is a high proportion, and raw walnuts taste flat against caramelised sugar. Eight minutes at 350F sharpens them considerably.
Candy of this kind is usually called penuche, a name generally traced to the Mexican Spanish panocha, a raw or unrefined sugar, though it also appeared in print simply as "brown sugar candy" or "brown sugar fudge" with no name at all. The recipe assumes a skill the modern cook has largely handed over to a thermometer, which is judging sugar concentration by eye and by the behaviour of a syrup dripped from a spoon.