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Almond Crisp-Tart
(Croccante) Sweet almonds, four and a half ounces.
Granulated sugar, three and a half ounces.
Skin the almonds, divide the two parts and cut each part into small pieces. Put these almonds so cut at the fire and dry them until they take a yellowish color, but do not toast. Meanwhile put the sugar on the fire in a saucepan and, when it is perfectly melted, pour the almonds hot and already sligthly browned. Now lower the fire and be careful not to allow the compound to be overdone. The precise point is known when the mixture acquires a cinnamon color. Then pour little by little in a cold mold, previously greased with butter or oil. Press with a lemon against the walls of the mold, making the mixture as thin as possible. Remove from the mold when perfectly cooled and, if it is difficult to do so, dip the mold in boiling water.
The almonds can also be dried in the sun and chopped fine, adding a small piece of butter when they are in the sugar.
This is a dry-caramel almond brittle, shaped rather than poured flat. The whole recipe turns on how far you take the sugar: pull it a shade early and it stays pale and sweet, take it a shade too far and it turns bitter and acrid.
- WeightsFour and a half ounces of almonds is about 130 g; three and a half ounces of sugar about 100 g, i.e. roughly nine parts nuts to seven parts sugar: a nut-heavy brittle rather than a mostly-sugar one.
- "Divide the two parts"A blanched almond splits cleanly along its natural seam into two halves. Skin them by covering with boiling water for a minute, slipping off the skins, then halving and slicing each half.
- Drying the almondsThey go into the sugar hot and barely coloured, not toasted; the recipe says only to dry them at the fire, so a low oven or a pan over gentle heat, stopped at yellowish, answers. Cold almonds drop the temperature of the caramel and can seize it.
- Sugar with no water"Perfectly melted" means a dry caramel: sugar alone in a heavy pan over moderate heat, stirred as it liquefies. It will clump before it flows. Watch it rather than the clock.
- Cinnamon colour is the hingeThat shade is roughly 340-350F. Past it the caramel goes bitter within seconds, so lower the heat as instructed and be ready to pour immediately. Have the mould greased and standing by before you start the sugar.
- The lemonHalf a lemon, cut side down, is the tool the recipe specifies for pressing the hot croccante thin against the mould; it does not stick to the caramel the way a spoon does. Work fast, as the mixture stiffens quickly.
- Mould and releaseAny smooth metal form works, well oiled. If it grips when cool, a brief dip of the outside of the mould in very hot water loosens it. A silicone mat or oiled sheet pan gives a flat slab instead, which is easier and no less authentic in effect.
- Yield and keepingAbout 8 ounces of brittle, enough for six to eight people as a sweet with coffee. Molten sugar at this temperature causes serious burns; keep hands out of it. Store airtight, since caramel absorbs humidity and turns tacky within a day in a damp kitchen.
Croccante simply means "crunchy," and versions of it appear across the Mediterranean wherever almonds and sugar meet: Spanish and Sicilian brittles, French nougatine. In Italy it belongs above all to festival and fairground cookery, sold in sheets or moulded shapes at saints' days and Christmas markets. The moulding here is what marks it as a confectioner's recipe rather than a domestic one: the same hot mixture pressed into a decorative form was used to build the shells and baskets that held ices and creams on a nineteenth-century Italian table, which is why the instructions assume you own a mould and know what cinnamon-coloured sugar looks like.