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Prawlenes
Two cupfuls of granulated sugar, one-half cup of hot water; cook until it hairs; carefully pick over one cupful of hickory nut meats, stir into sugar, drain and spread on waxed paper to cool.
A two-ingredient sugar candy that lives or dies by the syrup stage. Everything here hinges on reading "until it hairs," and a thermometer removes the guesswork.
- "Until it hairs"Generally read as an old test for the thread stage: syrup lifted on a spoon falls in a fine hair or thread rather than dropping in beads, in the region of 230-235F. Cook much further and the syrup will set progressively firmer rather than coating the nuts in a thin crackle.
- ProportionsTwo cups granulated sugar to half a cup hot water is a standard 4:1 syrup. Stir only until the sugar dissolves, then leave it alone; agitation after that invites crystallization, and a lid on the pan for the first minute or two washes stray crystals off the sides.
- "Drain"The instruction is loose. The intent is to lift the coated nuts out with a fork or slotted spoon, letting excess syrup run back into the pan, then drop them in clusters on the paper. Do not attempt to pour the whole panful out as a sheet.
- Hickory nutsShagbark hickory is closely related to pecan and was a free, local nut across much of the American Midwest in the period. Pecans are the nearest substitute; walnuts work but are more tannic.
- "Carefully pick over"Not padding. Hickory shells are hard and splintery, and hand-cracked meats routinely carry shell fragments. Shop-shelled nuts still deserve a look.
- Waxed paperFine as written, though parchment or a silicone mat releases more cleanly. Have it laid out and ready before the syrup reaches temperature; the working time is short.
- YieldSomething under a pound of candy once the excess syrup has drained back, in the region of two dozen small clusters. They keep for a few days in a tin, but go sticky in humid weather.
These are not the soft, creamy brown-sugar pralines of New Orleans, which take milk or cream and are beaten until they lose their gloss. This is the simpler form, and probably the older one: nuts turned in clear boiled sugar, a descendant of the French praline, the almond-in-caramelized-sugar confection generally traced to the seventeenth-century French court and often credited to the kitchen of Marshal du Plessis-Praslin, the soldier and royal official whose name it carries. Cooks in French Louisiana swapped the native pecan for the almond, and the recipe traveled north; by the time it reached a general-purpose American household manual it had picked up a phonetic spelling, "Prawlenes," and the hickory nut, which cost nothing in a region where the trees grew wild. The absence of a thermometer is typical of candy chapters of the period, which taught the whole scale by hand tests "hairs," "threads," "soft ball," "crack" and assumed a cook who had watched someone else do it.