PEANUT BRITTLE
- 1½ pounds sugar.
- ¾ pound glucose.
- 2 ounces butter.
- ½ tablespoonful vanilla.
- ¾ pound peanuts. (Raw.)
- 1 heaping teaspoonful soda.
- ⅔ pint water.
Put sugar, glucose and water on hot fire and stir until it commences boiling, wash down sides of kettle, cover until it steams well, remove cover, and put in thermometer and cook to 275, then take out the thermometer and put in the peanuts and butter, and stir constantly after you put the peanuts in. This of course will reduce the temperature of the batch, but it will soon boil up, and must be cooked until the peanuts are roasted, and the candy becomes a golden brown color, which it does about the time the peanuts are roasted sufficiently. Sometimes the peanuts will commence to pop, which indicates that they are roasted about enough, but if they do not pop, you can very easily tell when they are roasted sufficiently, as a great many of them break open, and by lifting the paddle occasionally with some of the peanuts on it, you can tell by their looks if they are roasted or not. There is no exact degree to which this second cooking must be done, but be careful and do not let your batch get too brown. After making one or two batches you will have no trouble in cooking it correctly. The proper peanuts to use in this candy are the small unroasted Spanish peanuts that we mentioned before. Do not attempt to put roasted peanuts in this candy in this manner but if you should use the roasted ones, they must be stirred in after the candy is cooked, as they would burn black if you put them in as we directed you in using the raw ones.
This candy is intended only to be made with the unroasted peanuts as directed, and if properly done, it is the finest peanut brittle made.
When the peanuts are roasted, set off the fire and stir the vanilla in well. Have your soda dissolved in just a very little water, using only enough to cover it. Immediately after stirring in the vanilla, pour in the dissolved soda and stir through the batch thoroughly, which will cause it to foam up considerably and get lighter in color. As soon as you have it stirred enough so that the batch is thoroughly mixed and foamy, pour on greased slab, and it will be necessary to scrape the kettle out in making this candy.
Always have your slab warm before pouring this candy on it, as it is cooked very high and will harden very quickly if your slab is cold, which you do not want it to do. If you stand your slab by the stove for a while, previous to making the candy, it will warm it enough. After being on the slab a very few moments, take hold of it all the way around the edge, lift it so as to free it from the slab, then catch hold of one side with both hands, one hand at each end of the batch, and quickly flop the whole batch right over, just the same as you would turn a pancake. Now commence around the edge and stretch it, by pulling it out as thin as possible, and you will find that the candy will stretch out very easily and leave all the peanuts completely covered with the candy.
Always work very rapidly in doing this, and also work around the edges first, as that hardens more quickly than the center of the batch. If your slab is not large enough to hold this candy after it is stretched out, as soon as you stretch part of it, cut that off with a knife and lay it on some smooth surface, so that the candy will be perfectly flat when cool, as it looks better. By cutting it off as you stretch it, in this manner, you will find that after you have worked around the edges, your slab will probably be large enough to hold the remainder of the batch after being stretched out. The thinner you stretch this the nicer it will be, so try and do not leave any thick places in it, and you will find you have the finest peanut candy you ever tasted, being as brittle as glass, and it may be eaten as easily as a soda cracker.
In making this candy, you must have a kettle large enough to allow for the foaming up, and a kettle holding two and one half gallons will easily hold a batch just twice the size of this. You will find it is very easy to flop the batch over, if you loosen it first as we directed you. This is essentially a cold weather candy, as it keeps brittle then, and is much better.