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Clear Almond Taffy
1 cupful water 2 cupfuls almonds Pinch cream of tartar 1/2 teaspoonful almond extract 1/4 teaspoonful salt Blanch, split, and bake almonds to golden brown. Crisco a tin, and sprinkle almonds on it split side down. Dissolve sugar and water together in saucepan, add Crisco, salt, and cream of tartar, and boil until when tested in cold water it will be brittle, or 300° F. Add almond extract and pour over nuts. When firm, cut in squares.
Sufficient for one large pan.
A hard-crack nut brittle from Procter & Gamble's Crisco promotional cookbook. The ingredient list as printed is incomplete, which is the first thing to sort out before you start.
- Missing quantitiesThe method calls for sugar and for Crisco, but neither appears in the ingredient list as printed here, so the amounts are genuinely unknown. A workable ratio for 1 cupful of water is roughly 2 cupfuls of sugar and a tablespoon of fat, but that is a reconstruction, not the book's figure.
- 300°F is the whole recipeThe syrup must reach hard-crack. Use a candy thermometer and pull it at 300°F (149°C); below about 290°F the taffy stays tacky and will not snap, and much above 310°F it takes on a scorched bitterness. The cold-water test the book describes is the same thing done by hand — a drop should shatter, not bend.
- CriscoThe hydrogenated all-vegetable shortening this book was written to sell. Any solid shortening, or butter for better flavour, works in the same quantity; "Crisco a tin" simply means grease the pan.
- Cream of tartarA pinch is about 1/8 teaspoon. It inverts some of the sucrose as the syrup boils, which discourages graining — important here, since the taffy is meant to be clear rather than opaque.
- Blanching and toastingCover the almonds with boiling water for a minute, slip the skins, then split them along the seam. The book gives no oven temperature, only "golden brown"; a moderate oven, around 350°F for 8–10 minutes, will do it. Toasting before the syrup goes on is what gives the candy its flavour.
- The panThe book says only "one large pan"; any rimmed sheet pan will serve. Marking squares with an oiled knife while the sheet is still warm and pliable, then breaking along the lines once cold, is easier than cutting brittle that has fully set.
- Yield and keepingThe book says only "sufficient for one large pan"; on the reconstructed quantities that is somewhere around 1 1/2 lb of candy. Store it airtight — humidity will turn hard-crack sugar sticky.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was a cookbook published by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with a product that had no precedent in their kitchens: a shelf-stable white shortening made from hydrogenated cottonseed oil, introduced in 1911. Almost every recipe in it uses Crisco somewhere, sometimes, as here, for nothing more than greasing a tin — the book's job was to make the tub a fixture on the shelf. Clear nut taffies and brittles were standard home-candy fare by then, having spread with the cheap availability of refined white sugar; almonds were a comparatively costly nut, which suggests a holiday or company sweet rather than an everyday one. The instruction to "Crisco a tin" turns the brand name into a verb, and its casual appearance in the instructions shows exactly what the publisher was after.