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Salted Almonds
Blanch the almonds, and dry. Put a good sized piece of butter into a dripping pan, and as it warms stir the almonds over and over to coat them with butter; set in the oven, stirring often, until they begin to color, shake in colander to rid of grease, spread on a dish and sprinkle with salt.
A short, forgiving recipe, but it depends entirely on how closely you watch the pan. Almonds carry heat and go from pale gold to burnt in under a minute.
- BlanchingPour boiling water over shelled almonds, let stand two minutes, drain, and slip the skins off between finger and thumb. Dry them thoroughly on a towel — wet nuts steam rather than toast, and they spit in hot butter.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. Use 325–350F and check every four or five minutes, stirring each time; 15–20 minutes is usual for whole blanched almonds. At higher heat the butter browns and the outsides scorch before the nuts are toasted through.
- Dripping panA dripping pan is a shallow rectangular roasting pan. Any rimmed baking sheet works, but keep the almonds in a single layer or the ones underneath will not color.
- "A good sized piece of butter"The original quantifies neither the butter nor the almonds. A tablespoon or two for a pound of nuts is enough to slick every nut without frying them. Excess butter is what the colander step removes.
- The hingeTake them out when they are one shade lighter than you want. The residual heat in the nuts keeps cooking them on the plate, and almonds taste bitter and scorched well before they look black.
- SaltingSalt while the nuts are still hot and faintly greasy, which is when it sticks best. Fine sea salt or popcorn salt adheres better than coarse crystals.
- Quantity and keepingA pound of blanched almonds makes a generous bowlful, enough for a dozen or so as a nibble. Cool completely before storing, or trapped steam will soften them; stored airtight they keep for a week or two.
Salted almonds sit in the candy chapter of Butterick's book because turn-of-the-century American entertaining treated them as part of the same course as bonbons and salted pecans — small dishes set along the table for a dinner party. Almonds themselves were long a luxury import in the United States, though California orchards were producing commercially by the late nineteenth century, and blanched almonds turn up freely in cookbooks of this period. Blanching, oiling and toasting is a very old handling of the nut, familiar from Mediterranean and Middle Eastern kitchens for centuries; here the fat is butter rather than olive oil, and the nuts are shaken in a colander to strip the surplus grease.