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Chocolate Fudge
1 cupful milk Pinch of salt 2 squares (2 ozs.) chocolate 2 cupfuls sugar 1 tablespoonful Crisco 1 teaspoonful vanilla extract Put Crisco, milk, sugar, salt, and chocolate into saucepan, and stir and boil until it forms a soft ball when tested in cold water, or 240 degree F. Remove from fire, add extract, allow to stand a minute, and beat until creamy. Pour into Criscoed tin and mark off into squares.
A plain boiled fudge with no corn syrup or cream of tartar, which means the beating stage decides whether it sets smooth or grainy.
- The hinge: when to beatTake the pan off the heat at 240F and let it stand until the surface loses its gloss and the pan is comfortable to touch (about 110F) before beating. Beating a boiling-hot syrup produces coarse, gritty crystals; beating a cooled one gives the fine grain that reads as creamy.
- Chocolate "squares"Two squares of two ounces total is unsweetened baking chocolate, which was traditionally sold in one-ounce squares; check the wrapper, as modern bars are not always scored that way. Do not substitute semi-sweet or chips: the sugar balance and the setting behaviour both change.
- CriscoAn all-vegetable shortening, and this book was written to sell it. A tablespoon of butter does the same job and tastes better; the fat is there to keep the fudge from setting hard and to release it from the tin.
- 240F, checked properlyUse a candy thermometer with the bulb in the syrup and not touching the pan bottom. The cold-water soft-ball test is a fair backup: a dropped bead should flatten between your fingers but hold together.
- Boiling without scorchingMilk and sugar catch easily. Use a heavy pan of at least two quarts, stir until the sugar dissolves, then stir only occasionally and wipe crystals from the sides with a wet brush.
- "Criscoed tin"A greased shallow pan; an 8-inch square lined with parchment and lightly greased works. Mark the squares while the fudge is warm and cut through once it is firm.
- YieldAbout a pound and a quarter, roughly 16 to 25 squares depending on how small you cut them. Keeps a week in a tin, not the refrigerator, where it sweats.
- Why it is filed under EggsFiled under Eggs -- it is not an egg dish; why a sweet sits in that section of the book is not explained.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble, the makers of Crisco, which had been introduced in 1911 as a hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening sold as a substitute for both butter and lard. That accounts for the tablespoon of Crisco in a fudge that hardly needs it, and for the instruction to grease the tin with it as well: every recipe in the book is a demonstration. Fudge itself is an American invention of the late nineteenth century, generally traced to women's college kitchens in the 1880s and 1890s, where cheap refined sugar and a chafing dish made candy-making a dormitory pastime; recipes circulated by hand long before they reached print, and the name is usually explained as slang for a botched job, which is roughly what a crystallised sugar syrup is.