Nougat

Nougat belongs to a Mediterranean and Middle-Eastern family of honey-and-nut confections of considerable age — a recipe of whipped egg white, sweetener and flavoring already appears in a 10th-century Baghdad cookbook (where it was called nāṭif), and the sweet is documented in 15th-century Spain and later made famous by Montélimar in France. The English word 'nougat' was borrowed from French in the early 19th century, the French name going back to Old Occitan 'nogat', meaning roughly 'made with nuts'; the Chinese name 牛轧 is a phonetic transliteration. Taiwan inherited Western-style nougat and localized it into something of its own: makers began using milk powder as a main ingredient alongside sugar, butter and egg white, and switched the nut to roasted peanuts, producing a milky, soft, chewy candy. Exactly who first brought nougat to Taiwan, and when, is not cleanly documented; what is clear is that the milk-and-peanut style took hold and became a staple gift candy — sold in souvenir boxes and handed out as wedding favors and at the New Year.

Soft and chewy, never glassy — it gives slowly under the teeth and pulls in a long, tender chew rather than shattering. The first taste is butter and milk, rich and round, like condensed-milk candy; the sweetness is full but clean, sweet without cloying. Through it run the roasted peanuts, crunchy, fragrant, and faintly salty, their savory edge cutting the dairy richness. A good piece is pale ivory and smooth on the tongue; if the syrup grained, it turns sandy and dull.

Nougat is sugar confectionery built on an aerated egg-white foam. Sugar and maltose are boiled with a little water to drive off moisture, and the final firmness is set by how hot the syrup goes: a soft, chewable nougat is cooked to roughly the soft-ball stage, around 120 to 140 degrees, while a hotter syrup gives a harder candy, because the more water removed, the firmer the cooled sugar. The hot syrup is poured in a thin stream into stiffly whipped egg white, whose proteins trap air and stabilize the mass into a pale, light foam — which is why nougat is also called 'egg-white candy.' Maltose is decisive: like invert sugar, it interferes with sucrose crystallizing, so the candy stays smooth instead of graining into a sandy texture, and the syrup is not stirred while it boils, since stirring drops the temperature and triggers crystallization on the pan wall. Butter and milk powder are then folded in for richness and a tender chew, the milk fat and milk sugar (lactose) deepening the aroma and browning; finally the roasted peanuts go in for crunch and structure, and the mass is pressed flat, cooled, and cut.