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Nut Candy
Put three breakfast cupfuls of sugar into a sugar-boiler with one teacupful each of vinegar and water and the strained juice of a lemon. Set the boiler on the fire and stir until boiled to the crack. Drop it in small quantities on a well-buttered baking-sheet, put half a blanched kernel on each, and when nearly cold add more syrup. When the required number are done, dry them on a sieve over the fire, and they are ready for use.
A hard-crack sugar drop with a nut set into each one — simple in outline, but the original leans on vessels, cup sizes and a sugar stage that no longer mean much without translation.
- The stage is everything"Boiled to the crack" is essentially the hard-crack stage, around 300–310F on a candy thermometer; a drop in cold water should snap rather than bend. Older books sometimes set plain "crack" a few degrees lower than "hard crack." Short of the stage the candies stay tacky and sticky in the air; taken well past it the sugar begins to scorch.
- Do not keep stirringThe original says to stir until it reaches the crack. Modern practice is to stir only until the sugar has dissolved, then leave it alone and wash any crystals down from the sides of the pan with a wet brush, or the batch may grain.
- Cup sizesA breakfast cup is roughly 8–10 fl oz, so three of them is about 1 1/2 lb of sugar. A teacup is smaller, about 5–6 fl oz — so figure a scant 3/4 cup each of vinegar and water.
- Sugar-boilerAn unlined copper pan with a pouring lip, used for nothing but sugar. Any heavy-bottomed saucepan with high sides does the job; the depth matters because the syrup climbs as it boils.
- Why the vinegar and lemonBoth are there as acid, which inverts part of the sugar and discourages crystallisation. The volume is generous by modern practice; most of it boils off, but the finished candy keeps a distinct sharpness.
- "Blanched kernel"Oscar does not say which nut. Blanching points to almonds, common in the confectionery of the period, though other kernels were blanched too; halved almonds or filbert halves both work.
- The second syrupThe extra syrup added over the nut once the drop is nearly cold presumably seals the kernel in and gives a glossy top. Keep the remaining syrup warm and fluid over very low heat rather than reheating it hard, which drives it past the crack.
- Drying"On a sieve over the fire" means gentle residual warmth to drive off surface moisture — a rack in an oven at its lowest setting, door propped, or simply a dry room for a few hours. Store airtight; hard-crack sugar draws damp quickly.
- YieldRoughly 1 1/2 lb of sugar makes something like five to six dozen small drops, depending on how generously they are spooned.
Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, published his Cook Book in 1896, and its confectionery chapters read like a professional pastry kitchen's working notes rather than a home cook's. That is why the sugar stages appear as bare trade terms — thread, ball, crack, caramel — with no thermometer readings: a confectioner judged them by the water test and the sound of the syrup. Sugar drops with a nut pressed into them belong to a very old European confectioner's repertoire, cousins to the French praline and to the nut brittles of earlier English cookery books; what marks this version is the heavy hand with vinegar, one of the acids the trade relied on for crystal control.