No. 3696

Salted Almonds

Amandes Salees

Select fine, whole almonds, peel and lay them on a paper-covered baking sheet. Push this into a hot oven and when roasted to a fine golden brown throw them into a basin and sprinkle with a little water, slightly thickened with gum arabic, then dredge with very fine salt through a salt box having a perforated lid. Stir the almonds from time to time until dry, then leave to cool. Hazel-nuts, walnuts, and pistachios can also be salted; these are generally dressed in crimped paper cases or small fancy boxes; they are passed around with the desert, or at the same time as the hors d'oeuvre, and then left on the table during the entire length of the dinner. It is an improvement to mix these nuts and serve them together.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A two-ingredient recipe whose only real technique is the gum arabic wash, which is what makes the salt cling. Everything else is attention to the oven.

Peel means blanchDrop shelled almonds into boiling water for about a minute, drain, and the skins slip off between finger and thumb. Dry them thoroughly on a towel before roasting or they will steam rather than colour.
"A hot oven"Ranhofer gives no figures, but a hot oven is conventionally read as something in the region of 400F. Almonds scorch quickly at that heat and the colour continues to deepen after they come out, so pull them a shade lighter than you want and shake the pan every few minutes. At 350F they take 12-15 minutes with far less risk.
Gum arabicA food-grade tree gum, still sold as gum acacia in baking and confectionery suppliers. Dissolve a scant teaspoon in a tablespoon or two of warm water; it should be barely viscous, not syrupy. Lightly beaten egg white or a teaspoon of neutral oil will do the same job of holding the salt, though the gum dries hardest and leaves the least trace of flavour.
SaltVery fine salt only — flaked or coarse salt slides straight off. The perforated "salt box" is a shaker; any fine-mesh shaker works. Roughly a teaspoon per pound of nuts is plenty.
Order of operationsThe nuts must be hot from the oven when the wash goes on, so the water flashes off and leaves the gum as a thin tacky film. Stirring as they cool keeps them separate rather than cemented into clumps.
The other nutsHazelnuts want roasting first, then rubbing in a towel to shed their skins. Walnuts and pistachios are more delicate and are better at 325–350F; pistachios in particular lose their green if pushed hard.
Yield and keepingRanhofer gives no quantities; a pound of blanched almonds will fill several small dishes. Once completely cold they keep two or three weeks in an airtight jar; any residual warmth trapped inside will soften them.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York and published The Epicurean in 1894 as a full record of that restaurant's repertoire, which is why so many of its entries concern service as much as cookery. The note here that salted nuts are "passed around with the desert, or at the same time as the hors d'oeuvre, and then left on the table during the entire length of the dinner" describes a fixture of the late-nineteenth-century formal table, where small dishes of salted almonds sat among the salt cellars and bonbons for the whole meal. Gum arabic, tapped from acacia trees and imported chiefly through Sudan and North Africa, was a standard confectioner's material of the period, used for glazing pastilles and fixing sugar work; using it to make salt adhere to a hot nut is the same trick applied sideways. The crimped paper cases Ranhofer calls for were the ordinary dress of anything served in miniature at table.