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Butternuts
Butternuts are the richest of nuts, but not easily obtained. Brazil nuts are a good substitute, and may be served deviled as a warming adjunct to an afternoon tea these wintry days. Blanch the nuts. To each cupful of nuts add a tablespoonful of salad oil. Let them stand half an hour, then sprinkle them with salt, in the proportion of a tablespoonful to a cup of nuts, adding a pinch of cayenne pepper to each quantity of salt. Toss the nuts about thoroughly to become well mixed with the salt and pepper. Spread on baking tins and put in the oven until crisp and brown.
A simple spiced nut, written for a cook who was expected to know her own oven. Two things need attention: the oven is unspecified, and the salt quantity is far beyond modern taste.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. Oily nuts scorch quickly and the interior cooks slowly, so 300-325F is right, on a single layer, stirring every five minutes. Fifteen to twenty minutes gets Brazil nuts crisp and lightly coloured; they will keep darkening off the heat.
- The salt is a coating, not a seasoningA tablespoon of salt to a cup of nuts is several times what anyone would eat. The salt may have been meant as a dry medium to carry the oil and cayenne over every surface, with the excess shaken off in a sieve after roasting, though the recipe does not say to do this. If you salt to taste instead, use about half a teaspoon per cup.
- Blanching Brazil nutsShelled Brazil nuts have a thin brown skin. Cover with boiling water for a minute or two, drain, and rub in a towel; the skins slip off. This is worth doing, as the skin is bitter and turns acrid in the oven.
- "Salad oil"At this period the term usually meant olive oil, often a mild grade, though cottonseed oil was widely sold under the same name in America. Any neutral oil works; a tablespoon per cup is generous, and the half-hour soak lets it penetrate rather than merely coat.
- Butternuts themselvesJuglans cinerea, the white walnut. The recipe is honest that they were hard to get even then, and they are harder now. If you find them, they are oilier and softer than black walnuts and go rancid fast; keep them frozen and roast them more gently than Brazils.
- YieldA cup of shelled nuts serves four to six alongside tea. Cool them completely before storing, or the trapped steam softens the crust; they hold a few days in a tight tin.
Butternut, or white walnut, was a genuinely American nut, gathered rather than farmed, and its oiliness made it prized for cakes and candies in the northeastern states. By the time this book appeared it was already difficult to buy in quantity, which is why the author reaches immediately for the Brazil nut, then arriving in American ports in growing volume from the Amazon trade. The butternut has since become scarcer still, largely through butternut canker, a fungal disease that has killed much of the standing population. "Deviled" here means what it usually meant in the period: salted and sharpened with cayenne, a small savoury counterweight on a tea table otherwise given over to sweets, and offered in winter because hot spiced things were thought warming.