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Brazil-Nuts Pralines
Put one pound of shelled Brazil-nuts into a pan over the fire with a little water and one pound of loaf sugar and let them boil until they begin to sparkle, then remove the pan from the fire and with a wooden spoon stir the nuts well until the sugar begins to feel gritty; put them over a slow fire in order to dissolve the sugar again and keep on stirring that the nuts may get well covered with sugar, and when they turn reddish and are sufficiently well covered with sugar take from the fire, pour them onto a sieve, cover the sieve with a clean cloth and place it in the oven; this will dry the sugar on the nuts and cause them to look glossy.
This is the classic French praliné method — nuts cooked in syrup, the syrup deliberately crystallized to a sandy coating, then re-melted just enough to glaze. The whole thing hinges on that crystallization, so read the second and third points before you start.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in hard cones and broken up for use; ordinary granulated white sugar is the direct substitute, one pound (about 2 1/4 cups). Do not use superfine or powdered sugar, which behave differently in syrup.
- "A little water"Unspecified in the original. About 1/2 cup to a pound of sugar is enough to dissolve it; the water is only a vehicle and most of it boils away as the syrup cooks.
- "Until they begin to sparkle"Probably the visual cue for a syrup boiled down to somewhere around 240-250F, the point at which it will grain when stirred off the heat. The original gives no temperature, so a candy thermometer is the surer guide.
- The graining stepStirring off the heat is not optional and not a mistake — the friction seeds crystals so the syrup collapses into dry white sand around each nut. If it stays syrupy, keep stirring; if it seizes into one lump, break it up and continue.
- "Turn reddish"The second, slow heating melts that sand back into a thin caramel. Reddish means light amber. Sugar goes from amber to acrid in under a minute, so pull the pan the moment the color shifts and keep stirring throughout.
- Drying ovenA coal or wood range usually had a cooler oven or warming compartment that could be used for drying. Use 175-200F, or the lowest setting your oven offers, for 20-30 minutes; too much heat will soften the glaze and the nuts will stick together.
- The nutsWhole Brazil nuts are large and the coating on them is thick; halving them lengthwise gives a better ratio and a more even glaze. Toast them dry for a few minutes first if they taste flat — Brazil nuts are high in oil and go rancid quickly, so buy them fresh.
- Yield and keepingGetting on for two pounds of finished pralines. Store airtight; the sugar shell draws moisture from humid air and turns tacky within a day or two otherwise.
Praline in its original sense means a nut cooked in sugar, not the soft pecan patty that New Orleans later made famous — the name is generally traced to the 17th-century French Marshal du Plessis-Praslin, whose household is said to have popularized sugared almonds. The technique here, crystallizing the syrup and then remelting it, is the standard confectioner's method for a glazed nut and appears in French manuals through the 19th century. What dates this version is the nut: Brazil nuts (still often sold as "cream nuts" in Oscar's day) reached American ports in growing quantity as shipping from Pará expanded in the later 1800s, and by the 1890s they were familiar in the American nut trade and on the Christmas nut bowl. Substituting them for almonds may be a local adaptation of a borrowed French formula.