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Praline, Sugared Almonds
Place two pounds granulated sugar with a teaspoon vanilla essence in a copper basin, add a half pint cold water, place basin on a brisk fire and cook till it has attained the third degree. Then drop in a pound fine, large, unpeeled, almonds, stir well with wooden spoon and let briskly boil for three minutes. Briskly stir with a wooden spoon until sugar granulates, place almonds and sugar in a colander and briskly shake, so as to separate. Place almonds in the copper basin, stir with wooden spoon on the fire until sugar adhering is thoroughly melted, then add the other sugar, and as soon as all the sugar is dissolved immediately pour almonds on a marble slab, separate from one another, place on a paper and let get cold. Place a tablespoon gum arabic in a basin with two tablespoons water, dissolve gum, add pralines, toss well, then place all at once on a sieve. Keep sieve in a hot place till thoroughly dry and pralines will be ready.
This is the classic French method for pralines — whole almonds tumbled in boiled sugar until it grains, then re-melted to a glossy caramel coat. The whole thing turns on recognising the moment the sugar sands.
- "The third degree"The old French scale of sugar degrees was never standardised from book to book, so treat this as approximate: for almonds that will grain properly, soft-ball stage, in the region of 238-240F on a thermometer, is the usual modern reading.
- The hinge: grainingStirring the syrup as it cools is what forces the supersaturated sugar to crystallise into a dry sand around each nut; the recipe implies this is done away from the fire, since it directs you back onto the fire afterwards. Keep the spoon moving through the whole mass; if you stop early you get a sticky lump rather than separate coated almonds.
- Copper basinUnlined copper conducts evenly and is traditional for sugar work, but any heavy-bottomed saucepan does the job. Do not use a thin pan — scorched sugar at the base will taint the batch.
- Vanilla timingVanilla essence added at the start will lose much of its aroma over the boiling. Stirring it in during the graining stage, or using a split vanilla pod in the syrup, keeps more of the flavour.
- Unpeeled almondsThe skins are wanted here: they grip the sugar and give the finished praline its darker, slightly bitter edge. Whole natural (skin-on) almonds are what to buy.
- Gum arabicSold as acacia gum, still available as a food-grade powder from baking suppliers. It dries to a thin hard glaze that keeps the pralines shiny and stops them weeping in humid air; skipping it costs only appearance and shelf life.
- Drying"A hot place" means gentle, dry warmth — the lowest oven setting with the door propped, or an airing cupboard — until the coating is no longer tacky, as the recipe says, "thoroughly dry".
- Yield and keepingTwo pounds of sugar to one of almonds gives roughly three pounds of finished pralines. Stored airtight away from damp they keep for weeks; refrigeration makes them sticky.
Sugared almonds of this kind are the original pralines, and the name is traditionally traced to the seventeenth-century French diplomat César, duc de Choiseul, comte du Plessis-Praslin, whose cook is generally credited with the sweet — in literature more often than it is documented. The technique is pure professional confiserie: cook, grain, re-melt, gum, dry, each step a distinct trade operation, which is why the instructions read like a workshop procedure rather than a home recipe. Filippini wrote for and out of the great hotel kitchens, and the copper basin, marble slab and drying sieve here are the furniture of a nineteenth-century pastry department. The word travelled to Louisiana and attached itself to something quite different — a soft pecan-and-cream patty — but this crisp, skin-on almond version is what a European confectioner of 1906 would have meant by the term.