Nougat

• 1. Introduction

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  Nougat has a birthday, according to a legend from Cremona: the 25th of October 1441. On that day the condottiero Francesco Sforza married the illegitimate daughter of Filippo Visconti, duke of Milan. The wedding festivities supposedly produced the first Italian nougat. The tale appears to be a 20th-century fabrication, and the real record is older and stranger. Nougat is a family of confections made from a sweet paste whipped until it turns chewy or crunchy. In one country the word means a pale, firm block studded with nuts. In another it means a brown hazelnut paste eaten on its own. In a third it means the soft filling inside a candy bar. How can one word cover so many different sweets? Who first whipped these pastes, and in which kitchens? And how did the word travel so far from them?

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• 2. A Word With Many Roots

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  The word nougat entered English in the early 19th century, borrowed from French. French had taken it from Old Occitan nogat, which meant nutty, or a thing with nuts. Medieval Catalan and Castilian had related words, but these first described nutty sauces. Only later were they adapted to name the confection.

  English speakers still disagree about how to say it. The French-style NOO-gah is the closest imitation. Two spelling pronunciations have also caught on. One is NUH-git, which rhymes with nugget. The other is NOO-gət, the standard American form.

  English sometimes borrows local names instead. Turrón in Spain and torrone in Italy and Brazil both come from the Latin torrere, meaning to roast. Venetian nougat follows a different path. It is mandorlato in Cremona, mandulat in Croatia, mantoláto in Greece and mandolate in Brazil, all from a popular development of the Latin word for almond.

  The Maltese and Sicilian names, cubbàita and cupeta, descend from the Arabic qubbayṭ. In Iran, the version from the Isfahan region is called gaz. That name reflects an ingredient: sweet honeydew from plant lice called psyllids, which cooks long mistook for the sap of the astragalus plant.

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• 3. Roman Rumors

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  Varro, Livy, Martial, Cicero, Aulus Gellius and Plautus are all sometimes said to mention nougat. The claim rests on the simplicity of the recipe and on a resemblance between Latin words and dialect terms such as the Italian cupeto and copeta. But the Roman words in those authors covered sweet and salty delicacies alike, so they prove little.

  Similar confections were probably still known to the Greeks and Romans. Cato describes a Carthaginian dish of eggs, honey, flour and cheese. The Samnites are sometimes credited with a confection of egg, honey and hazelnut.

  Then there are the terse recipes in the Apicius. They are usually read as custards of walnut, hazelnut and pine nut. They may have been a kind of nougat that included milk, spices and oil. One of them tells the cook to "spread it out on a pan and when cool cut it into handy pieces like small cookies".

  None of these dishes clearly involves whipped egg white. That ingredient turns up with more certainty in a book written centuries later, in another capital.

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• 4. Baghdad Records

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  A 10th-century book written in Baghdad, then the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate, holds the more certain early recipes. They describe a confection of whipped egg white, sweeteners and flavorings called nāṭif. The name comes from an Arabic root with the base sense of dribbling or trickling, a nod to the paste's viscous mass. The recipes separate the varieties made in Baghdad, now in Iraq, from those made in Harran, now in southeastern Turkey.

  Medieval mentions of nāṭif have been found within the triangle between Urfa, Aleppo and Baghdad. The 10th-century traveler Ibn Hawqal also wrote about it. He stated that he ate nāṭif in Manbij, now in Syria, and in Bukhara, now in Uzbekistan.

  A related sweet, halva, is attested in Persia by at least the 9th century. Gaz, a soft Iranian pistachio nougat scented with rosewater, is documented only since the late 16th century. Arab and Persian cooks liked to add spices and flower water to their nougats. European cooks never copied that habit, and their versions stayed plainer.

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• 5. Crossing To Europe

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  Gerard of Cremona, a member of the Toledo School of Translators, may have mentioned an Arabic nougat called turun in a medical translation as early as the 12th century. By the early modern period, nougat was made in southern Italy and across the Venetian Empire. A separate tradition credits Frederick II, whose close ties to southern Italy and its Sicilian Arabs may have introduced or reintroduced the sweet to Cremona during his 13th-century campaigns. Cremona was then the most loyal imperial city in Lombardy.

  Enrique de Villena's 1423 Arte Cisoria, a treatise on using knives at table, gives Spain its first written mention of nougat. In the 16th century it appeared in the novels of Miguel de Cervantes. It also featured in recipes such as those in Lope de Rueda's La Generosa Paliza.

  Provence first records nougat in the 17th century, though it probably reached Marseille in the mid-16th century.

  Montélimar, a town in the Provençal interior, gave its name to the version that spread across Europe in the 19th century. The nougat was well received at the Universal Exposition, the 1878 Paris World Fair. The town's mayor, Émile Loubet, promoted it tirelessly. He later became France's prime minister and then its president, in the 1890s and 1900s.

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• 6. Dark Nougat North

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  In the early 19th century, Britain blockaded France and its allies, and Napoleon answered with an embargo on British goods. Pure cocoa became hard to get. Chocolatiers around Turin, then annexed to France, experimented with other fillers, including almonds and grains. Powdered flavorings were by then producing darker nougats, especially ones made with cocoa powder.

  In 1852, Michele Prochet tried finely ground roasted hazelnuts and produced Caffarel's gianduiotto chocolates. The new flavor was cheaper and easier to find than cocoa. It became especially popular in Central and Northern Europe, where hazelnut or hazelnut chocolate nougat is now the standard.

  In those regions nougat is usually made with gianduja, a mixture of cocoa and hazelnuts. The white form is often set apart as French nougat. Viennese nougat is a soft variant that contains cocoa mass, butter, sugar and hazelnuts.

  Fazer introduced it to Finland in 1904. It has since become a staple Finnish Christmas treat.

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• 7. The Minneapolis Accident

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  The Pendergast Candy Company of Minneapolis, Minnesota, made dark nougat in the early 20th century. Its customers were the many German and Scandinavian immigrants who had filled the Midwest. During the early 1920s, one batch was made with far too many eggs, and the result was a much airier confection. Pendergast used it in a walnut-flavored bar called the Fat Emma. The Minneapolis, or Minnesota, nougat was soon copied by Frank and Forrest Mars for their extremely successful 1923 Milky Way bar.

  In the United States, nougat now usually means a softer brown paste made in factories. It typically consists of corn syrup or sucrose aerated with a whipping agent, such as hydrolyzed soy protein or gelatine. Makers may add vegetable fats, milk powder and preservatives to adjust its character. It fills commercial bars, often alongside milk chocolate, caramel and peanuts.

  Varieties of it are found in Baby Ruth, Double Decker, Fast Break, Milky Way, Moro, Nuts, Snickers, Twin Bing and Zero bars. A few American sweets make nougat their main component. The especially aerated fluffy nougat is the chief ingredient of the 3 Musketeers bar.

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• 8. White Nougat Today

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  Montélimar nougat is traditionally made with whipped egg white, sugar, lavender honey, roasted almonds and pistachios, vanilla and unleavened bread. It received protected status in 2024. White nougat in Western and Southern Europe is usually made at home or by artisan nougat makers, known in French as nougatiers. Some wrap it in edible wafer paper to ease handling, which can change the taste depending on how thick the paper is.

  Spanish turrón is traditionally made with whipped egg whites, honey and roasted almonds, in two distinct styles. Soft Jijona nougat is more than 60% almonds by mass, kept mushy or crumbly by added oil. Hard Alicante nougat has no such oil and is extremely firm, especially in very thick blocks. Jijona nougat has also received PGI protected status.

  Italian torrone uses the same base but usually adds vanilla or citrus and edible rice paper. Venetian mandorlato is generally firmer, and the variety from Cologna Veneta on the Veneto mainland is especially esteemed. Both Spanish and Italian nougat are prominent in Christmas meals.

  In Malta, local nougat is sold at village festivals. In Romania, alviță is sold at festivals and fairgrounds, particularly on the Sunday of Forgiveness before Lent. In Britain, nougat is traditionally made in the southern European style and is common at fairgrounds and seaside resorts. The usual industrial type is pink and white, often with fruit flavor, and sometimes wrapped in rice paper with almonds and cherries.

  French nougat contains no milk or milk powder. When the sweet reached Taiwan, preparers there made milk powder the main ingredient, adding sugar, cream, protein, nuts, dried fruit and petals. Their list includes cranberry, golden pomelo, mango, orange, longan and osmanthus. Similar forms are now found throughout mainland China.

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