A Carnival Verse About Pralines*
*With a stanza on pronunciations. **And a recipe!
Down Royal to Louis, don’t ask “Who dat?”
Not Huey, or any such Doodah-crat
But the chef du monde of the School of Cookin’
New Orleans style. We took a look-in.
He taught us to taste, and how to say
“New Orleans” as if we were Michael Doucet,
Nu-AWlins, locals say, or try “NAW-leans,”
To make it rhyme with this treat, PRALINES*
(which contain from a tree to rhyme with Le Mans,
A nut right expensive these days, say “pe-CAHNs”).
How to Make Pralines
Combine butter, milk and vanilla in a saucepan over medium low heat. Heat, stirring, until butter melts.
Add sugars in a pile in the center, avoiding the sides of the pan as much as possible. With a wooden spoon, cut canals in the sugar to flood in liquid. Add pecans. Stir slowly, avoiding aeration and keeping bottom clear.
Hang a candy thermometer into the pan. Stir slowly but constantly until the temperature rises to the soft-ball stage (238-240 degrees farenheit). A good test is to drop a small amount into cold water; if the candy forms a ball in the water, you’ve reached the ideal temperature.
Ingredients
— 1½ cups sugar
— 6 tbsp butter, salted or not (¾ stick)
— ¾ cup light brown sugar, packed
— 1 ½ cups pecans
— ½ cup whole milk
— 1 tbsp vanilla
Remove from heat. Stir until mixture thickens and becomes creamy and cloudy, and pecans stay suspended in mixture.
After the mixture has cooled a little, spoon out 25 to 30 still-hot dollops — once you start, don’t hesitate — on buttered waxed paper, or better, parchment paper on a marble counter. If using waxed paper, be sure to buffer with newspaper underneath, as hot wax will transfer to whatever is beneath.
(In New Orleans, you can find an actual newspaper seven days a week since the three-days-a-week Times-Picayune was bought in 2019 by the Baton Rouge Advocate, saved and merged. The digital edition will not buffer your waxed paper.)
Doug Cumming is an associate professor emeritus of journalism at Washington & Lee University with 26 years experience at metro newspapers and magazines. After getting at Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in mass communications, he has taught multimedia reporting and feature writing at Loyola University in New Orleans and at W&L in Virginia. Earlier, he worked at the newspapers in Raleigh, North Carolina, Providence, Rhode Island, and Atlanta, Georgia; was editor of the Sunday Magazine in Providence; and helped launch Southpoint monthly magazine in Atlanta. He won a George Polk Award and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard. He also plays a mean saxophone. He now lives in Decatur, Georgia.