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Nut Candy
Four cupfuls of granulated sugar; let it melt over a hot fire, stir constantly; when melted, add a quart of peanuts chopped fine. Pour on a bread board and roll; cut in squares.
This is a dry-caramel peanut brittle with no butter, corn syrup or soda — just melted sugar and nuts, which makes it harder and more glassy than modern brittle and far less forgiving of delay.
- Do everything before you startOnce four cups of sugar liquefy there is perhaps a minute of working time. Chop the peanuts, oil a marble slab or heavy board and an oiled rolling pin, and have an oiled knife or bench scraper ready before the pan goes on the heat.
- "A hot fire" means medium, not highOn a modern gas or induction burner, medium heat and constant stirring is right. Dry sugar scorches at the pan bottom long before the top has melted; a heavy-bottomed pan matters more than the burner setting.
- Colour is the doneness cueThere is no thermometer stage here because the sugar is dry-melted, not boiled with water. Pull it when it is the colour of clear amber or a copper penny — roughly 340-350F. Darker than that and the whole slab turns bitter.
- A quart of peanutsA quart of shelled peanuts is about 1 lb 4 oz, that is, four cups. Warm them in a low oven first; cold nuts drop the caramel's temperature and it stiffens before you can spread it.
- Rolling, not pouring thin"Pour on a bread board and roll" gives a slab perhaps a quarter-inch thick, though the recipe gives no thickness. Use an oiled pin and work fast, and score the squares while the candy is still pliable — once it sets hard it shatters along its own lines rather than yours.
- No soda means no bubblesModern brittle recipes add baking soda for that porous, easily bitten texture. This one is solid caramelized sugar and will be genuinely hard on the teeth. Rolling it thinner helps.
- HumidityUncoated dry caramel picks up moisture and goes tacky within a day in a damp kitchen. Store it in an airtight tin between sheets of parchment, and don't make it on a wet afternoon.
- YieldRoughly 3 lb of candy from four cups of sugar and a quart of nuts — one large slab.
Peanut candy of this kind spread in American cookbooks after the Civil War, as peanuts moved from a Southern field crop and street-vendor snack to a cheap, nationally shipped grocery item. Recipes like this one belong to the era before commercial glucose syrup was a pantry staple: the confectioner simply melted sugar dry and stirred in whatever nut was cheapest. The name "brittle" for the same sweet was in use by the 1890s, but household books of the period often filed it under a plainer heading like this one. The instruction to pour onto a bread board suggests a home cook working with the flat wooden surface she already had rather than a marble slab.