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Hard Candies: Peanut
Peanut Nougat 2 cups sugar 1 quart peanuts 1/4 teaspoon salt Shell, remove skins, and finely chop peanuts. Sprinkle with one fourth teaspoon salt. Put sugar in hot iron frying pan, place on range, and stir constantly with wooden spoon until melted to a syrup, taking care to keep sugar from sides of pan. Add nut meats, pour at once into a warm buttered tin, or on marble slab, and mark in small squares. If sugar is not removed from range as soon as melted, it will quickly burn.
Nut Bar Cover the bottom of a buttered shallow pan with one and one third cups nut meats (castaneas, English walnuts, or almonds) cut in quarters. Pour over two cups sugar, melted as for Peanut Nougat. Mark in bars. Nut Brittle 1 1/2 cups shelled nuts 1/4 teaspoon salt 1 cup sugar 1/2 cup corn syrup 1/2 cup water 1 1/2 tablespoons butter 1/2 teaspoon lemon extract Use peanuts or any other nuts desired, sprinkle with salt, and place in oven to become hot. Put sugar, corn syrup, and water in saucepan, stir until it begins to boil, wash down sides of saucepan with a wet butter brush, and cook to 295 degrees F., or until mixture is very brittle when tried in cold water. Add butter, extract, and nuts and turn into a buttered pan or tray. As soon as it can be handled, turn the mass over, and pull and stretch it out as thin as possible. Break in irregular pieces. In damp weather keep in covered jar that it may not become sticky.
Three related sugar-and-nut candies: two dry-caramel slabs and one true brittle cooked with syrup and water. The dry caramel is the demanding one, since melted sugar goes from amber to burnt in seconds.
- The hinge: dry caramel waits for nobodySugar melted alone in a pan has no water to buffer it, so it colours and then scorches very fast. Have the nuts salted and the buttered pan or oiled marble slab standing ready before the sugar goes on the heat, and lift the pan off the moment the last crystals dissolve.
- Iron pan, wooden spoonA heavy skillet is still the right vessel because it holds steady heat; cast iron or heavy stainless both work. Keep the sugar pushed into the centre, as the film that creeps up the sides is what burns first and darkens the whole batch.
- "A quart of peanuts" is ambiguousThe instruction to shell them suggests a quart measured in the shell, which yields roughly 2 cups, about 10 oz, of nut meats. If you read it as a quart of shelled nuts, closer to 20 oz, you get a much nuttier, drier slab; either makes candy, but the smaller amount matches 2 cups of sugar better.
- Castaneas are chestnutsCastanea is the botanical genus of the sweet chestnut, and older cookbooks use the name for the nut itself. They must be shelled and peeled first, and being starchy rather than oily they give a softer, less crisp bar than walnuts or almonds.
- 295 degrees F is real and worth measuringThat is essentially the hard-crack stage (usually given as about 300-310F), and still short of caramelisation, which begins nearer 320F. A digital thermometer beats the cold-water test; at this temperature a drizzled thread should snap cleanly rather than bend.
- The wet butter brushThis is the period's version of washing down the pan with a wet pastry brush to dissolve stray crystals off the sides and prevent the syrup graining. A clean silicone brush and plain water do the same job, or simply cover the pan for the first minute of boiling and let the steam do it.
- No baking soda hereMany modern peanut brittle recipes add a teaspoon of soda at the end, which foams the candy and makes it light and porous. These versions have no aerating agent and set dense and glassy; the brittle is pulled thin instead.
- Pulling the brittleTurn the sheet as soon as it can be touched with buttered hands or gloves and stretch it while it is still hot and pliable. Once it has cooled and stiffened it stops moving and will simply crack.
- Yield and storageThe three recipes each make somewhere between a pound and a pound and a half of candy. The note about damp weather is sound chemistry, not superstition: cooked sugar draws moisture from the air and turns tacky, so store it airtight with the pieces separated by parchment.
The word nougat here is doing loose duty: this is not the aerated, egg-white nougat of Montelimar but the older, simpler idea of sugar bound with nuts, closer to a French croquant or Italian croccante. Peanuts made the difference in American candy books of this era. Cheap, plentiful and increasingly shelled and roasted by machine in the decades after the Civil War, they turned what had been a luxury confection of almonds into something any household could afford, and they arrive in cookbooks alongside commercial corn syrup, which spread through American kitchens around the turn of the century and is called for by name in the brittle. The two techniques on this page mark a dividing line in candy making: dry caramel, judged entirely by eye and speed, belongs to the older hand tradition, while the syrup-and-water version cooked to a stated 295F belongs to the thermometer-equipped domestic-science kitchen that produced books like this one.