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Sugared Walnuts
Take off the skins of about three dozen walnuts, separate them into halves and mask them with an icing made of four ounces of sugar and an egg, Place them on a sheet of thick paper, stand them in the oven, and bake until of a light brown color. Take them out, remove them from the paper when cold, and they are then ready for use. The walnuts, after being skinned and divided into halves, should be dried at the oven door. Serve them piled on a glass dish. A delicious sweetmeat is made by dipping the kernels into thick chocolate and icing.
A straightforward confection, but the wording assumes habits a modern cook no longer has: nuts are sold shelled and skin-on, paper means parchment, and the oven is being used as a dryer rather than a baker.
- The hinge: low and slowThis is closer to drying than to hard baking. The recipe says only "bake until of a light brown color"; a low oven, somewhere around 250-275F, is the safest reading, since higher heat risks scorching the sugar coating and turning the walnut oil bitter before the icing sets. Check often; the browning is likely to come from the icing rather than the nut.
- "Take off the skins"Pour boiling water over the shelled halves, let them stand a minute or two, then rub the papery brown skin away with a towel. Skinning matters here because that skin carries most of the tannic bitterness the sugar is meant to offset.
- Drying at the oven doorRanges of the period gave a warm spot at the open oven door, and directions to dry things there are common. Ten minutes at 200F, or an hour on a rack in a warm dry room, does the same job. The halves should be thoroughly dry or the icing will slide off.
- Four ounces of sugar and an eggFour ounces is a weight: 1/2 cup plus a tablespoon of granulated, or about 1 cup of confectioners'. Confectioners' sugar will give a smoother, more opaque "mask." Note that the recipe specifies only "an egg"; using the white alone, beaten to soft peaks before the sugar is worked in, is a modern choice rather than what the text says.
- Raw egg in the icingA thin icing in a low oven may not reach a safe temperature, and the chocolate variation as read here would put icing over set chocolate with no further heat. Use pasteurized egg white.
- "Thick paper"Parchment on a sheet pan. Avoid waxed paper, whose wax will melt in the oven, and do not try to lift the nuts while warm — the sugar is still plastic and will tear. Cold, they release cleanly.
- Thick chocolateMelted couverture or good chips, tempered or at least cooled to just-fluid so it sets firm rather than staying tacky. Dip, set on parchment until hard, then ice.
- YieldThree dozen walnuts give roughly 70 halves, about 2 cups — enough for a dessert dish for eight to ten. They will keep for a few days in a tin; refrigeration is best avoided, as the icing can weep.
Sugared nuts belong to the last course of a formal nineteenth-century dinner, the stage when bonbons, crystallized fruit and salted or glazed nuts came to the table in small glass dishes to be picked at over coffee — the "sweetmeats" of the recipe's own wording. Oscar Tschirky, who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893 and compiled this book in 1896, was cataloguing a working repertoire rather than inventing dishes, and confections like this one were the pastry department's stock in trade: cheap in materials, entirely a matter of labor. The walnuts meant here are English (Persian) walnuts, by then shipped in quantity from France and increasingly from California, whose thin-shelled cultivated varieties had begun displacing the native American black walnut in city markets. The egg-white-and-sugar coating is the same royal icing used for cake work, borrowed sideways.