For Maggie Sweeney, making Grandpa Jim’s Peanut Brittle for the holidays is a labor of love and of remembrance.
“Grandpa Jim was my father,” she said in a recent interview. “I inherited from him a family tradition that he got from his father. When I was growing up in central Ohio, every year my father made batches and batches of peanut brittle to give to his friends as Christmas gifts.
“My brother and sister and I would sort of hang on his elbows so we could be the testers.”
Sweeney and her husband, Kevin, have lived in Greenfield for more than 30 years. For at least 20 of those years, she has made peanut brittle each fall to give to family and friends for Christmas.
She generally orders five pounds of raw Spanish peanuts around Thanksgiving and makes four to five batches of brittle over a two-week period.
Much of the brittle goes to family members. She boxes up brittle to send to her siblings, whom she called “a category by themselves” because they share her memories of helping her father prepare the confection.
Kevin Sweeney is the brittle’s biggest fan and enjoys the way his wife’s creation makes the house smell, she said. “He sits upstairs and eventually comes down to see if it’s ready for sampling.”
She also gives brittle to her adult children and to several neighbors. In fact, she said, one of the neighbors had an odd reaction when Sweeney told her this article would publicize the brittle. “She seemed ambivalent,” the candymaker said of her neighbor. “She thinks that this is her own little secret.”
This year, the brittle garnered additional attention as it was featured recently as part of the Mistletoe Mart To Go at Greenfield’s Episcopal Church of Saints James and Andrew.
With in-person holiday bazaars out of the question this year because of the pandemic, the church cleverly decided to sell certain items online, including half-pound packages of Sweeney’s brittle.
For people who want to make and offer peanut brittle this year, she offered this advice: First, she explained, it is important to choose the right day to cook. Cool, dry temperatures are ideal for this project.
Sweeney noted that she finds a marble slab essential for candymaking. Marble keeps its temperature better than most surfaces; this means that it can absorb heat from the brittle without getting too hot itself.
After she places the candy on her greased marble slab, she uses a greased spatula to begin to scoop up the edges of the candy. She butters her fingers and uses them and the spatula to pull, stretch and turn the brittle until she has a thin sheet.
She admitted that novice brittle makers may certainly use a good candy thermometer instead of employing the techniques described in her recipe to determine whether the candy has reached the soft-ball and hard-crack stages.
Sweeney herself prefers the old-fashioned methods, however, which she described as “embedded in (her) DNA.”
When she is ready to mail the brittle to a far-away relative, she packs it carefully into a plastic food-storage container, lining the inside of the container with tissue paper so that the brittle doesn’t move around and break up.
She then places the container in a cardboard box, surrounds it with Styrofoam peanuts, and sends it off to its recipient.
Around this time of year, Sweeney says there’s not much better than this special holiday treat.
“There really is nothing like homemade peanut brittle. I have concluded over the years that you can’t get it anywhere else,” she said. “It’s very much wrapped up in my mind with Christmas in my home when I was growing up.”
2 cups sugar
1 cup light corn syrup
1/2 cup water
2 cups raw Spanish peanuts (nuts.com is a good source, according to Sweeney)
1 pinch salt
1½ tablespoons butter
1½ teaspoons vanilla
2 teaspoons baking soda
Equipment: A large cast-iron skillet and a marble slab
Put the sugar, the corn syrup, and the water into the skillet and cook over medium heat until the mixture reaches the soft-ball stage.
This happens pretty quickly. If you drop a little of the syrup into ice water, it will form a soft ball when you pick it up. When that has happened, stir in the peanuts. Cook over medium high heat until it has reached the hard-crack stage (see below).
While the candy is cooking, grease your marble slab and assemble the other ingredients. The syrup can take anywhere from 12 to 20 minutes to reach the hard-crack stage.
It’s important to stir often so that the peanuts don’t burn. You will know that you should begin to test the syrup when it has started to get thicker and darker.
Testing it involves spinning a bit of the syrup from the end of a wooden spoon into ice water. If it’s ready, the candy will harden instantly and not stick to your teeth. When the syrup is ready, stir in the salt, the butter, the vanilla, and the baking soda.
Mix everything well, and pour the candy very carefully onto the prepared slab. Let it rest for a minute or two; put some butter on your hands and on a spatula during this time.
Pound, stretch and flip the candy until it is as thin as you can get it, using first the spatula and then your hands. It shouldn’t be more than one peanut thick anywhere. “It’s a matter of pride to get it as thin as possible,” said Maggie Sweeney.
Let the brittle cool completely on the slab. Break it up a little but not too much; Sweeney likes big pieces. Makes about 2 pounds.
Tinky Weisblat is the award-winning author of “The Pudding Hollow Cookbook,” “Pulling Taffy,” and “Love, Laughter, and Rhubarb.” Visit her website, TinkyCooks.com.