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Almonds and Raisins for Dessert
The finest quality of Valencia raisins, in good bunches, with a purple bloom on the fruit, are requisite for this purpose. Pile up the bunches on the dish in the form of a pyramid upon a lace-pattern dessert paper, and strew well-blanched almonds over and between the bunches.
Salted and "Deviled" Almonds.
Blanch and dry in a cloth as many Jordan almonds as may be required, put them into a fryingpan with a little butter and fry them until they are of a delicate fawn color. Then pour them into a colander and sprinkle them over immediately with fine table salt, tossing them as they are sprinkled. Serve hot or cold in little trays with cheese. To devil them, mix with the salt twice the quantity of cayenne pepper and sprinkle as before.
Two things on one page: an arrangement of raisins on the stem, and a pan of fried salted almonds. Only the almonds need real technique, and the pan is where they are won or lost.
- Jordan almondsNot the sugar-shelled candy of a wedding favour, but the long, flat, sweet almond originally shipped from Malaga (the name is a corruption of jardin). Any large whole raw almond does the job; buy them raw, not roasted.
- BlanchingCover with boiling water for about a minute, drain, and the skins slip off between finger and thumb. Drying is not optional — wet nuts spit in hot butter and steam instead of colouring.
- Butter will burnWhole butter browns and goes bitter before almonds are cooked through. Use clarified butter, or half butter and half a neutral oil, over medium heat, and keep the nuts moving.
- "Delicate fawn color"A light tan, roughly 5 to 8 minutes. Pull them a shade earlier than looks right; they keep cooking in their own heat once drained, and a properly done almond is pale gold inside, not white.
- Salt while hotThe hinge of the recipe. Salt sticks only to the film of hot fat, so it must go on the instant they leave the pan, with constant tossing. Fine salt, as specified — coarse crystals fall straight off.
- The cayenne ratioTwice as much cayenne as salt is fierce by modern palates. Start at equal parts, or less, and taste as you go.
- Quantities and yieldNone are given because this was scaled to the table. Reckon 1 lb of blanched almonds, 2 tablespoons of clarified butter and about 2 teaspoons of fine salt; a pound serves 10 to 12 as a savoury with cheese.
- The raisinsValencia raisins were sold in clusters still attached to the stem; the nearest modern equivalent is muscatel or "raisins on the vine" clusters, which some Spanish and Middle Eastern grocers stock around Christmas. The "lace-pattern dessert paper" is a paper doily.
This is dessert service in the old sense: after the sweets came the fruit course, and dried fruit with nuts in the shell or blanched was its plainest and most enduring form. Oscar Tschirky, the maitre d'hotel whose name carried the Waldorf's reputation into print in 1896, was recording what a well-run New York dining room did rather than inventing anything, and the pyramid of stemmed raisins on a doily is pure late-Victorian table architecture, dismantled by hand. The salted almonds are the more modern half of the page. Salted and devilled nuts were well established in American hotel and club dining by the 1890s as an accompaniment to cheese, sherry and cocktails, though salted almonds were already familiar dessert-table fare before then, and it is tempting — if not documented — to trace from them a line of descent to the bowl of cocktail nuts, which by mid-century had migrated out of the kitchen and into the tin.