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Peanut Brittle
1 pint Karo, Blue Label 1/4 teaspoon vanilla 1 cup granulated sugar 1/3 teaspoon baking soda 2 cups roasted peanuts Combine the Karo and sugar and boil to 300 degrees F. or until brittle when a little is dropped in cold water. Add the soda to the candy and spread thickly on oiled pans containing a layer of roasted peanuts.
A corn-syrup-heavy brittle from a manufacturer's booklet, written for cooks who worked by the cold-water test rather than a thermometer. Two things need attention: the soda step, and the fact that the vanilla is never given a moment to go in.
- Karo Blue LabelKaro was sold in colour-coded grades, the blue label being the lighter, more delicately flavoured syrup, with other labels running darker. Ordinary light corn syrup is the direct replacement. A pint is 2 cups, and at roughly 11 oz per cup that is a heavy pour of syrup against a single cup of sugar.
- Why so much syrupThe high proportion of corn syrup to sugar is the point of the recipe, not an accident of the era. Glucose interferes with sucrose crystallising, so this batch is very forgiving of stirring and scraping and will not turn grainy the way an all-sugar brittle can.
- 300 F is hard crackUse a clipped-on candy thermometer and check it in boiling water first. The cold-water test given as the alternative means the dropped syrup sets into a thread that snaps cleanly rather than bending; if it is still pliable, keep boiling.
- The soda, and the vanillaOff the heat, stir the baking soda in fast and evenly. It reacts with the acidic syrup and foams the whole mass pale and light, which is what makes brittle snap rather than shatter into glass shards. The recipe never says when to add the vanilla; add it at the same moment, since anything earlier simply boils away.
- 1/3 teaspoonAn awkward measure that need not be honoured exactly; anything from a generous 1/4 to a scant 1/2 teaspoon is the practical reading. Too much soda leaves a soapy, faintly bitter taste.
- Warm the pans and the nutsOil the pans and spread the peanuts in a single layer, then warm both in a low oven. Candy at 300 F stiffens the instant it meets cold metal, and cold nuts will pull the temperature down before you can spread it thin.
- Yield and storageRoughly 2 lb of brittle, filling one half-sheet pan when spread thin. Cool completely, break up, and keep airtight; brittle draws moisture from humid air and turns sticky within a day if left open.
This reads as a promotional recipe rather than a household one: the brand and label grade are specified at all, which is the signature of the booklets that corn syrup, cornstarch and baking powder makers distributed free to American cooks from the 1890s onward. Corn syrup, commercially available in the United States from the late nineteenth century and sold under the Karo name from 1902, was cheaper than sugar and chemically better suited to candy work, and the booklets pressed that advantage hard. Peanut brittle itself is often said to have originated in the American South, where peanuts moved from livestock feed to a household staple over the nineteenth century; the baking soda trick that aerates the syrup is the detail that separates the modern brittle from the older, denser peanut candies.