Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Peanut Candy
Peanut Candy
Dissolve two pounds of sugar and one saltspoonful of cream of tartar in two gills of cold water; then set it over a moderate fire and cook till brittle, adding and stirring in about one-half ounce of butter. Shell some peanuts, and rub off as much of the inner skin as possible. Put a layer of them two deep at the bottom of some well-buttered tins, and when the candy is ready, pour it over and leave till cold. Then cut it or break it into pieces of a convenient size.
A hard-crack peanut brittle with almost nothing in it: sugar, water, a pinch of acid, a scrap of butter. The only real variable is temperature, and the original leaves it to your judgment.
- "Till brittle" means 300-310FThis is the hard-crack stage, and a thermometer settles it in a way the drop test does not. Below about 295F the candy stays chewy and pulls at the teeth; much above 315F the sugar starts to darken and turn bitter.
- Two gills is one cupA gill is a quarter of a pint, so two gills of water to two pounds of sugar.
- A saltspoonfulRoughly a quarter teaspoon. The cream of tartar inverts a little of the sugar as it boils and keeps the batch from crystallizing into a grainy mass; do not leave it out.
- Half an ounce of butterAbout a tablespoon. Stir it in near the end, once the syrup is close to temperature, so it does not scorch through a long boil.
- Raw peanuts, and why the skins matterShelling the nuts and rubbing off the papery inner skin implies raw peanuts rather than roasted ones. Blanched raw peanuts do the job, though the poured syrup will only partly cook them; roasted salted peanuts work but will taste noticeably darker.
- Warm the tinsCold metal chills the syrup on contact and you get an uneven, thin-edged sheet. Butter the tins generously and set them somewhere warm while the sugar boils.
- Score before it sets hard"Cut it or break it" is a real choice. Neat squares need scoring with an oiled knife while the sheet is still leathery, perhaps five to ten minutes after pouring; wait longer and you are down to breaking it with the handle.
- Yield and keepingThe recipe never fixes a weight of nuts, so yield depends on how large your tins are; reckon on somewhat over two pounds of finished candy. Store it airtight, since brittle draws damp from the air and goes tacky within a day in a humid kitchen.
Peanut brittle in this form is generally traced to the American nineteenth century, when cheap refined sugar met a groundnut crop that is often said to have moved from Southern fodder and street-vendor snack to respectable confection over the course of a few decades. Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born ma tre d'h tel of the Waldorf, was not himself a cook, and his 1896 book gathers a great deal of ordinary American domestic cookery alongside the hotel's dining-room repertoire; a plain pan candy like this sits in it as a home-kitchen standard rather than anything the hotel would have plated. The cream of tartar is the technical heart of the recipe: a trace of acid boiled with sucrose produces invert sugar and blocks the crystal growth that turns a batch cloudy and short. Baking soda, which gives modern brittle its aerated, porous snap, is absent here, so the result is a denser, glassier sheet than most cooks now expect.