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Nut Toffee
Follow the preceding recipe, adding three-fourths cup chopped nut meats when the mixture is cooked. meats when the mixture is cooked.
This is a variation rather than a standalone recipe: everything but the nuts lives in the entry printed above it, and without that page you are working from a fragment. What follows covers the parts that carry over to any toffee of this era, plus the one instruction that is actually given here.
- The missing baseThe recipe depends entirely on "the preceding recipe," which is not reproduced here. Toffees of this kind are generally some combination of sugar and butter with a little water, boiled to a crack stage, but neither the ingredients nor the stage can be recovered from this page; find the base recipe before starting.
- "When the mixture is cooked"This is the hinge. Nuts go in after the syrup has reached its finished temperature and the pan is off the heat, not during the boil. Added early they scorch in the hot sugar and their oil clouds the candy.
- Hard crack means 300-310FJudging the stage -- Books of this period judge by cold-water test rather than thermometer: a drop into cold water should form threads that snap rather than bend, which corresponds to what is now called hard crack, about 300-310F. This page names no stage, so take the reading from the base recipe rather than from this note.
- Three-fourths cup of nut meatsThat is roughly 3 oz, or about 85 g, chopped. The recipe does not say which nut; warm or lightly toasted nuts are less likely to chill the syrup as you stir them through.
- Work fast once the nuts are inToffee boiled to a crack stage stiffens quickly off the heat. Have the buttered pan or marble slab ready before you start, stir the nuts through in a few strokes, and pour immediately.
- Score before it sets hardMark the slab into squares with an oiled knife while the sheet is still warm and pliable, roughly five minutes after pouring. Cold toffee shatters unpredictably instead of breaking on the lines.
Toffee sits in the family of boiled-sugar sweets that became a home project once cheap refined sugar and reliable stoves reached ordinary kitchens in the nineteenth century. The economy of the entry is typical of period cookbooks: rather than reprint a full page of syrup instructions, the compiler simply hangs a variation off the recipe above it, which worked well enough when the book was read in order and works poorly when a single page is reproduced on its own. The word itself is generally traced to English usage in the early 1800s, with the spelling wobbling between toffee, toffy and taffy for decades before American writers settled taffy on the pulled sweet and toffee on the brittle buttered one.