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Praline
Place two pounds granulated sugar in a copper basin, add two gills water, set basin on the fire, add a split vanilla stick and cook sugar until it attains the fourth degree. Drop in all at once a pound of whole unpeeled almonds, continually stir with spatula until a nice light brown colour, remove, drop praline on a lightly oiled marble, let thoroughly cool off, crack in pieces and use as required.
A classic French pralin — caramelised almonds broken up for use in creams, ices and fillings — written in the shorthand of a professional pastry kitchen. Two things need translating: the sugar "degree" and the moment the mixture appears to fail.
- The hinge: let it sandWhen the almonds hit the syrup and you stir, the sugar will seize into a dry white grit clinging to the nuts. That is correct, not a ruined batch. Keep stirring over steady heat and the crystals will re-melt into an amber caramel that coats the almonds evenly.
- "The fourth degree"The old French scale of boiling sugar (lissé, perlé, soufflé, boulé, cassé, caramel) was counted differently from book to book, so this is genuinely ambiguous. In practice the sugar wants to be in the soft-ball range, roughly 240F, since it is going to crystallise and then caramelise anyway.
- GillsA gill is four fluid ounces in US measure (half a cup), five in imperial, so two gills is about a cup of water to two pounds of sugar. That is a workable proportion for boiling sugar and gives you time before it reaches temperature.
- Copper basinUnlined copper conducts evenly and is traditional for sugar work; a heavy stainless or copper-core saucepan does the same job. Avoid nonstick, which cannot take caramel heat and will not survive the scraping.
- Vanilla stickA whole vanilla bean, split lengthways. Fish it out before or as you pour onto the marble — it will have blackened and given up its flavour by then.
- Unpeeled almondsSkin-on whole almonds, not blanched. The skins add colour and a faint bitterness that is part of the character, and they help the caramel grip.
- Marble and oilingA cold marble or granite slab pulls heat out fast; a heavy baking sheet lined with a silicone mat works as well and needs no oil. Use a neutral oil if you are oiling stone — the caramel will take on any flavour you give it.
- Colour and timing"A nice light brown" is the limit. Caramel carries residual heat and darkens after it leaves the pan, so pull it a shade lighter than you want. Past medium brown it turns bitter and no amount of cooling recovers it.
- Yield and keepingAbout three pounds of hard praline. Cracked into pieces or ground to a powder it keeps for weeks in an airtight jar; humidity is the enemy, as damp air makes it sticky. Ground fine and worked further in a processor it becomes praline paste.
Pralin in the French sense is a workshop ingredient rather than a sweet in its own right: caramelised nuts crushed to gravel or paste and folded into buttercreams, ice creams, soufflés and gateaux. The name is generally traced to the seventeenth-century Marshal du Plessis-Praslin, whose cook is traditionally credited with the sugared almond that took his master's name, though the story is repeated far more often than it is documented. What matters for the kitchen is that the almond and sugar pairing travelled: in Belgium praline came to mean a filled chocolate, and in Louisiana it became a soft pecan and cream patty, so a reader in New Orleans and a reader in Paris opening the same book would picture entirely different things. This version, with its copper basin, its degrees of sugar and its marble slab, is plainly written by and for a trained pastry cook — the kind of hotel-kitchen shorthand that fills the international compendia of the period.