Warm Spiced Holiday Nuts

Raw nuts roast more evenly than pre-roasted. The nuts will seem soft when hot but crisp as they cool. Adding rosemary after baking preserves its brightness. These make excellent hostess gifts in decorative jars. For extra crunch, add 1 egg white to the coating.

Spiced nuts have been a feature of American holiday entertaining since the colonial period, when sugar and spices — cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and allspice — were precious commodities brought to the American colonies through the Atlantic spice trade. Colonial-era American cookbooks including Amelia Simmons' American Cookery (1796), the first cookbook written by an American author and published in the United States, contain recipes for sweetened and spiced nuts served at holiday gatherings. The warm-spiced nut combination reflects two intersecting traditions: the European sugar-spice confectionery tradition that crystallized in medieval Arab-influenced cooking (pralines, sugar-coated almonds, and spiced confections appear in European confectionery texts from the 13th century onward), and the American South's tradition of using local pecans — the only major tree nut native to North America — in sweet preparations. Maple syrup, produced by Indigenous peoples of the northeastern woodlands for centuries before European contact, became a standard sweetener in northeastern American holiday cooking. The combination of sweet, salt, and warming spice satisfies multiple taste receptors simultaneously, which is why spiced nuts remain one of the most universally appealing cocktail accompaniments.