Catherine McClure’s Peanut Brittle

My sister in law Sheryl, Darwin’s wife, was my cooking teacher Friday.  Darwin wanted me to come down the day before but I was busy.  He was worried about the weather.  Sheryl had to take one of their granddaughters to an appointment and wouldn’t be home till ten.  They were calling for snow or something else to start in the afternoon.  Danvers is about an hour away.  I woke up later than I wanted, forgot the stuff I was going to bring them, made a thermos of coffee and still got there by 8:30.  That gave Darwin and I a chance to talk.  And we did.  We had a mutual political rant.  We’re on the same page politically and commiserated mightily about national and state politics.  It got loud.  It went something like this.

“Can you believe, this and so, and what they did?  Jesus Christ!”

“No I can’t.  It absolutely makes me this and that!  And on top of it, what about this other?”

“I know!  The dumb bastards.  What are they thinking? ”

“I have no idea.  What’s going to happen next?  Nothing good I don’t think.”

“Me either.”

Slowly the political talk cooled and we began to talk about family; our kids, his grand kids, the extended family, what everybody is doing.  It was a sweeping review of nearly everybody, taking up news from around the country and beyond.  Then I steered the conversation to the past.  I’m writing about the past, a collective past Darwin was part of, and I need to know when things happened in our lives.  It’s the kind of thing we don’t think of often.  Darwin made the switch, started putting events into the order in which they happened, matching years with those events, and I began taking notes.  Before Sheryl got home I tucked a valuable sheet of notes, a sort of timeline, into my bib overalls to take back to the shack.

When Sheryl got there she was all business.  The night before she had laid what we needed out on the counter by the stove:  raw peanuts, the candy thermometer, big sack of white sugar, two bottles of Karo syrup, baking soda, butter, table salt.  She had a saucepan on the stove.  The recipe was lying beside it.  I checked it out before she arrived.  It started like this.

3 cups white sugar

1 cup Karo white syrup

¾ cup warm water

Combine in a large saucepan, stir, heat on high.  Stir occasionally.

After a hard boil, reduce heat to three quarters.  Cook slowly to 280 degrees.

It was straightforward.  I considered starting without Sheryl but thought that unwise.  Best to let her take me through it because recipes, I’ve learned, never tell the whole story.  Like this for example.

“What do we do first Sheryl?”

“Butter the pan we’re going to pour it on.  You can get busy cooking, have it all ready, turn around needing to pour it out right away and if you haven’t buttered your pan its trouble.  So butter the pan.  And it has to be butter.  No oleo, no spray.  Butter.  Lots of it.

Sheryl was using a thick aluminum cookie sheet.  Mom used a chunk of dark marble, broken on one edge, from who knows where.  She would put it out on the porch and let it get cold.  Sheryl is not so sure cold is good.  She thinks that may speed up the cooling too much.  Anyway we don’t know where that chunk of marble went and Sheryl’s oversized cookie sheet works fine.  We slather it with butter.

“OK now you put the ingredients in the pan in the order they’re listed; sugar, syrup, and water.  You measure out the sugar.”

While I did that Sheryl poured out a cupful of that thick Karo syrup.  Has to be the white, not dark.  Sheryl used a little rubber spatula to get it all out of the measuring cup.  I made a note of that.  She added the water.

“Now you have to stir and nobody told me this but I’ve had better luck heating it slowly.  You can keep it on high till it boils, but then you have to turn it down and go slow till it gets up to 280 on the candy thermometer.  If you heat it too fast it gets funny when you put the peanuts in and turns out different.”

Some things you don’t understand, you just take a trusted one's word for it.  We patiently waited for the thermometer to rise.  Sheryl turned her electric stove top down to 7.  I had that figured for about medium high on my gas range.  Somewhere in there.  It’s an inexact science.

“I put the two cups of peanuts in a bowl so I can pour them right in the second it hits 280.  When the peanuts go in the temperature drops, then comes back up.  But you got to keep going slow to 305.”

She took a very close look at the thermometer.  I shined a light on it with my phone’s flashlight feature so she could see better.

  

“Where’d you get that?”

“It’s part of my I phone.”

“I don’t have a smart phone.  Mine is still a dumb phone.  Got those two cups of peanuts ready?”

She was still looking at the thermometer in the hot sugary brew.

“OK we’re there.  Pour them in.”

I poured in the peanuts and Sheryl immediately started chopping at them with her wooden spoon.

“I sort of chop these things in the mix.  Somebody told me once you don’t have to do this, that they separate anyway, but I just chop up and down and move them around to be sure.”

Sheryl was going after those peanuts.  I checked the thermometer and it went down to about 270 before it started coming up again.

“It won’t be long now.  Get that soda and salt ready.  I mix the two together and poke around on it making sure there’s no lumps.  Put it in that little half cup measure.”

She motioned with her head towards a little orange cup next to the peanuts.  I consulted the recipe and began to measure the soda.

Add 2 cups raw peanuts to mix

Cook to 305 degrees

Remove from heat

Add 3 teaspoons baking soda and 1 teaspoon salt

“That’s not enough soda,” Sheryl told me.  Actually she sort of barked at me.

“Says three teaspoons.  That’s just one.”

“They got to be heaping.”

“Doesn’t say heaping.”

“Yeah, well that’s the trouble with recipes.  Sometimes they don’t tell you everything.  The soda is real important.  I don’t know if the salt matters much.  But I didn’t used to use enough soda I don’t think. That or I stirred it too much and all the air went out of it.  You’ll see, the soda is what makes it expand and get airy.  Light kind of.  Some people’s peanut brittle is dark and almost glassy.  That’s why I always liked your Mom’s best because it’s light.  Real crisp and good.  That’s cause of the soda I think.  That and I don’t stir it too much.  I just stir it while I turn from the stove and walk to the counter where the cookie sheet is, then I pour it right away onto the sheet.  It works good.”

With that Sheryl took over and put three heaping teaspoons of plain old Arm and Hammer baking soda into the cup with a level teaspoon of table salt.  She was careful to press the lumps out of the soda and blend it together good.

“It’s almost to 305 David.  Now watch.”

When the temperature rose to the right number Sheryl took out thermometer, slid the pan off the heat, poured in the soda salt mixture right away, and spun around with the pan in one hand and a spoon in the other.  As she walked to the buttered sheet she stirred the soda around and around.  When she was standing in front of the pan she poured the mix straightaway onto the pan, from one side to the other, and scraped the sided of the saucepan quickly, getting all the hot sugar and syrup onto the buttered sheet.  I thought it would run off the edge of the pan but it stopped miraculously, like hot fiery lava stopping its slow advance just short of a church.

“Now you wait till its right.”

“How do you know?”

“You just have to know.  I’ll show you.”

Women in my family say that kind of thing about cooking all the time.  My Mom got disgusted when people asked about details she thought were obvious.  It was as if she thought everyone knew what she knew.  I once asked her how long she cooked the oysters in butter, the liquid they came in, and salt before adding them to hot milk mix for oyster stew.  She looked at me as if I were absolutely ignorant.

“Oh for God’s sake.  You just know.”

“No you don’t Mom.  You have to be judging it by something.”

She thought for a moment.

“OK then.  See those little black lines, that sort of layered fleshy skirt at the edge of the oyster?”

“Yeah.”

“When those start curling, getting wavy, they’re done.”

“Thanks.  Was that so hard Mom?”

Sheryl was more forgiving than Mom.  She explained that the people who didn’t make peanut brittle anymore found this part to be the hardest.  They can do all the rest, she explained, but they can’t pull it apart right.  Either the mass gets too cool and hardens, ends up a thick brick, or they burn their hands pulling it apart too quickly.  There’s an art to almost everything.  Knowing when to pull apart the peanut brittle seems to be the most critical and hardest to figure step.  I took a picture of Sheryl while we waited for her to declare the stuff ready to pull.

She kept feeling the edge.  Pushing it up off the pan and watching how fast it fell back into place.  Feeling the heat.  Pulling it slightly.

Here’s what the recipe says.

Let cool till edges harden.  Stretch into pieces on a flat surface and let cool completely.

“How about time Sheryl?  Like, let rest five minutes or something.”

“That doesn’t work for some reason.  Either the pan is cooler or warmer, or it’s cooler or warmer in the house or something. But it doesn’t exactly depend on time.  It depends on how firm the edge is, and how hot the batch is.  Look at that now.  See how it thins when you pull, stretches and sort of tugs along the stuff behind it?  That’s what you’re looking for.  Put some butter on your fingers and let’s pull this.  You pull your side I’ll pull mine.  Once we get the edges pulled we’ll wait for the middle to cool a little and then we’ll pull it.”

It was hot.  You couldn’t keep your fingers on it long.  We pulled hunks off the edges, pulled the hunks again to make smaller thinner pieces, let the pieces lay on the formica counter, and pulled more.

“Now keep moving those pieces around as they cool so they don’t stick hard to the counter.”

I did as I was told.  Then we pulled the middle same as we did the sides.  There were more peanuts in the middle.

“I wish I knew how to get the peanuts more uniform all over.  But people eat the pieces without the peanuts too.  It’s all good.”

Then we were done.

Sheryl got out a round plastic ice cream tub. When the pieces cooled we put them in the container.  She advised me to keep the lid off for a while to let the candy both dry and cool.  The pieces would stick together less.  She also told me not to leave the tub uncovered.  Too much air or moisture can make the pieces stick together.  We’d done a batch.  It was delicious.  It’s been a while since I ate Mom’s, but it was as good as I remember hers.

“OK.  That one is yours to take home.  Now you do it again for practice.  The newt one’s for me.”

I repeated the whole deal.  Darwin had retreated to the living room and CNN.  He got disgusted with news regarding a politician about to take office and turned it off, retreating to a novel. 

When the next batch was done and after we cleaned up and Darwin and Sheryl announced they were taking me to lunch.  They’d gotten a gift certificate at their 50^th wedding anniversary celebration earlier in the year and were waiting for an occasion to use it.  Darwin drove to a good place in Congerville called The Mercantile.  Homemade food and pies.  In Congerville these days it’s pretty much that place and the post office, a seed corn company and the elevator.  Riding over the blacktops on the way there I got to drive by farms I’d worked on or otherwise had a connection to fifty years ago.  I remembered people and events I hadn’t thought about in a long time. 

When we came out of the restaurant, rain was freezing on the windshield.  We got back to Danvers as quickly as we safely could and I started home.  Darwin worried about me again, wanting me to call when I got home.  I did.  I thanked he and Sheryl once more for a nice day.  Seeing family over Christmas is almost as good as homemade candy.  It’s a toss up.  And then maybe family and homemade candy are so tied together you can’t tell them apart.

I'm trying the home made caramels next.  Sheryl told me how to cut them and showed me how to make the wax paper wraps.  Evidently the hard part of making caramels is stirring it continuously.  Sheryl let me in on her secret stirring technique.  I'd try to make divinity but we've lost or never had Mom's recipe.  I don't know anyone that makes that from scratch anymore and neither does Sheryl.  Maybe you can help us out.