A cashew never arrives in its shell. Not in a nut bowl, not in a candy case, not in a bin at the grocery store. There is a reason for that, and it is a good one.
The shell is loaded with an oil that burns skin. Cashews are in the same plant family as poison ivy and poison oak, and the shell oil carries chemical relatives of the compound that makes those plants miserable, so anyone who has come home from a walk in the Humboldt hills with an itchy forearm would recognize the reaction. Nobody cracks cashews open at the kitchen table.
Every cashew you have eaten was steamed or roasted while still in the shell, before it was ever opened. The heat destroys the oil. Even the bags labeled raw cashews have been through that step. On a cashew package, raw means nothing was added afterward, not that the nut came off the tree untouched.
The nut grows in an odd spot. It hangs from the bottom of a red or yellow fruit called the cashew apple, which is edible but too perishable to ship, so it mostly stays where it grows. What we eat is the seed. Cashews are native to eastern Brazil, and Portuguese traders carried them across the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean in the sixteenth century, planting them in Goa and along the East African coast. From there the nut became a major crop in India, which built the industry that shelled and packed cashews for the rest of the world. By the time they reached American candy kitchens, they had already been traveling for three hundred years.
They work in toffee because of what they bring. A cashew is softer and sweeter than an almond, less assertive than a pecan, and it has enough natural richness that it does not need chocolate on top to feel finished. Our cashew toffee is the plain version, with no coating, just fresh cashews in a butter toffee made with real butter, sugar, and vanilla. Toffee is cooked to what candy makers call the hard crack stage, around 300 to 310 degrees, the point where almost all the water has boiled off and a drop in cold water hardens into a brittle thread instead of bending. That is the snap you hear when a piece breaks. The cashews interrupt that snap in the best way, giving each bite something to slow down on.
We sell it by the half pound and the full pound, which is a sensible size for a nut bowl or a host gift this time of year. If you have only ever had cashews out of a can, cashew toffee is a better introduction than any argument I could make for it.