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Grilled Pecans
Grilled pecans are an agreeable sweet to serve at luncheon. Blanch the nuts and to one cupful of sugar add onehalf cupful of water and boil for a few moments. Then drop in the nuts and leave them for about ten minutes. After removing from the fire stir the mixture 'until the syrup becomes thick and clings to the nuts. Spread to cool on a waxed paper.
This is a sugared or "sanded" nut — the syrup is stirred off the heat until it crystallizes into an opaque coating. The original assumes you know the candy stages, so a thermometer fills the gaps.
- The hinge: stir off the heatThe whole dish turns on agitating the syrup once the pan is off the fire. Stirring seeds crystallization, and the clear syrup turns cloudy and grainy and clings to each nut. Stir too early, over heat, and you get a scorched sticky mass; do not stir at all and the nuts set in one sheet of hard candy.
- "Boil for a few moments"One cup sugar to half a cup water. The recipe gives no test at all; for a coating that sands rather than staying tacky a syrup like this is usually taken to somewhere near the soft-ball stage (roughly 238-240F), though it will also concentrate further while the nuts sit in it. Under-cooked, the coating stays tacky; much hotter and the sugar colors before the nuts are coated.
- Blanching pecansPecans have a thin papery skin rather than the tight brown coat of almonds, and modern shelled pecans need no blanching at all. If you want to follow the instruction, a brief dip in boiling water and a rub in a towel is probably what was intended - dry the nuts thoroughly afterward or they will spit in the syrup.
- Quantity of nutsNone is given. One cup of sugar syrup will coat about two cups (roughly 8 oz) of pecan halves generously; three cups if you want a thinner, drier finish.
- The ten minutesTen minutes of the nuts sitting in boiling syrup is longer than needed and risks the sugar darkening. Two to three minutes over low heat is enough to heat the nuts through and drive off surface moisture; then pull the pan and start stirring.
- Toasting firstThe recipe does not call for it, but some cooks toast pecans briefly in a moderate oven before they go into the syrup for a fuller flavor.
- Spreading and storingWaxed paper is still right, or parchment. Separate the nuts with two forks while warm, which is easier than doing it after they have set. Kept airtight and dry they will hold for a week or more; humidity turns the sugar coating sticky.
- YieldAbout two cups of finished nuts, enough for eight to ten people as the luncheon sweet the book intends.
"Grilled" here is generally taken to be the French grillé, toasted or roasted, a term that turns up on sugared nuts in American cookbooks of the period, when French names carried social weight on a menu - the same impulse behind croquettes and timbales. The technique itself is much older and entirely unglamorous: boiled sugar stirred to a crystalline grain is the basis of the French praline and of the sugared almonds sold at fairs, and it survives in the pecan pralines of New Orleans, where cream and butter were added to the same syrup. Pecans are the one genuinely American note. They were still largely a Southern regional nut around the turn of the century, improved grafted varieties having spread commercially only in the preceding few decades.