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Peanut Nougat
Put one pound of granulated sugar in a graniteware saucepan and heat until the sugar is melted, stirring constantly. Have in readiness one quart of finely chopped peanuts which have been sprinkled with a pinch of salt. Place these in a buttered tin, warm slightly, and pour over the peanuts the melted sugar. Sugar cooked in this way will turn to caramel and for this reason must be removed from the stove the moment it is dissolved.
This is a dry-caramel nut candy — closer to what we would now call peanut brittle than to the soft white nougat of a candy box. It comes together in minutes, so everything must be weighed, chopped and warmed before the sugar goes on the heat.
- The hinge: pull it the instant it meltsThe instruction to remove the sugar "the moment it is dissolved" is the whole recipe. Dry sugar goes from clear melt to pale amber to bitter black in well under a minute, and it keeps cooking off the heat from the pan's own mass. Have the nut pan within arm's reach before you start.
- GranitewareEnamelled steel, the standard cheap saucepan of the period. Use a heavy stainless or thick aluminium pan instead; thin metal scorches the sugar at the hot spots before the rest has liquefied. Avoid nonstick, which is not rated for sugar temperatures.
- QuantitiesOne pound of granulated sugar is about 2 1/4 cups. One quart of finely chopped peanuts is 4 cups by volume, something over a pound of shelled nuts — a generous ratio of nut to sugar, so the finished sheet will be craggy rather than glassy.
- Why the nuts are warmedCold nuts chill the caramel on contact and it sets before it can coat anything. The recipe says only to warm them 'slightly' in the buttered tin; a few minutes in a very low oven will do. Warming the tin also buys you time to spread the mass.
- Stirring dry sugarThis recipe calls for constant stirring; modern candy work usually lets dry sugar melt undisturbed at the edges first, then stirs gently to even out the colour. Either way, a metal spoon or heatproof spatula is easier to keep free of stray sugar crystals than a wooden one.
- Spreading and breakingTurn the mass out and press it flat with a buttered spatula or the back of an oiled spoon while it is still pliable. Score it into squares within a minute or two if you want neat pieces; otherwise let it set hard and break it into shards.
- Salted peanutsThe pinch of salt assumes raw or unsalted roasted nuts. If you are using commercially salted cocktail peanuts, skip it.
- Yield and keepingSomething over two pounds of candy, enough to fill a 9x13-inch pan in a thin sheet. Store airtight; humidity turns the caramel sticky within a day in an open dish.
"Nougat" in American cookbooks of this era covered a wider field than it does now — not only the whipped, egg-white nougat of Montélimar but any confection of nuts bound in cooked sugar, including the hard caramel type the French call *nougatine*. Peanuts made it a distinctly American sweet: cheap, plentiful after the crop's post-Civil-War expansion in the South, and by 1900 a staple of street vendors, circuses and penny candy counters, which is why a mainstream household manual could treat a pound of them as an unremarkable pantry purchase. The dry-caramel method here, with no water and no thermometer, is one long-established way of working sugar, alongside the equally old wet-sugar methods; candy thermometers were available but still uncommon in home kitchens, so recipes leaned on visual cues and on stern warnings about the narrow window between melted and burnt.