Home › Candies › Crisco Fruit Fudge
Crisco Fruit Fudge
2 cupfuls sugar 1 cupful milk 2 tablespoonfuls cocoa 2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 teaspoonful vanilla extract 1 teaspoonful lemon extract 1/2 cupful chopped English walnut meats 1/2 cupful sultana raisins 2 tablespoonfuls cream Pinch of salt Put Crisco, sugar, cocoa, salt, and milk into saucepan, and stir till it boils to 240 degree, or until it forms a soft ball when tested in cold water. Remove from fire, add raisins, cream, nut meats, and extracts, and beat mixture until thick and creamy. Put back on stove, and heat, stirring constantly until melted, then pour into Criscoed tins. When partly cool mark into neat squares. Sufficient for thirty squares.
A straightforward boiled fudge from a shortening manufacturer's cookbook, with one unusual step: the candy is beaten to the creamy stage and then remelted before pouring.
- The temperature is the whole recipe240F is the soft-ball stage and the original is right to name it. Use a digital thermometer, clip it so the tip is submerged but off the pan bottom, and pull the pan the moment it registers; a few degrees over gives a hard, crumbly fudge.
- CriscoStill sold and essentially the same product in function, though reformulated over the years to remove partially hydrogenated oil and trans fat. Any solid vegetable shortening works; unsalted butter can be substituted at the same volume and will taste better, if less period-accurate.
- "Criscoed tins"Simply means greased pans. An 8-inch square pan, greased and lined with parchment, holds this batch at a good thickness for thirty squares.
- The remelting stepBeating cools and seeds the sugar into fine crystals; the brief return to the heat loosens the mass just enough to pour smooth. Keep it over the lowest possible heat and stir constantly, and stop the second it is fluid. Take it hotter and you dissolve the crystals you just worked to form, and the fudge sets grainy or refuses to set at all.
- CocoaThe recipe says only "cocoa"; natural unsweetened is the likeliest reading for an American book of this date. Dutch-process will work but gives a darker, milder result. Sift it with the sugar before the milk goes in, or it will lump.
- SultanasGolden raisins. Plump them in hot water for five minutes and pat dry if they are stiff, otherwise they draw moisture out of the finished candy.
- Lemon extractA teaspoon alongside the vanilla reads as a lot by modern taste. It appears here paired with the vanilla and cuts the sweetness, but half that amount is safer if you are unsure.
- Yield and keepingThirty small squares, as stated. Mark while warm, cut when fully set, and store airtight at room temperature; refrigeration makes fudge sweat.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and issued by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening the company launched in 1911. Books of this kind were among the most effective advertising of the era: a genuinely useful year of menus and recipes, calling for the sponsor's product throughout, including confectionery like this where a spoonful or two of shortening does little beyond keeping the mixture from catching and enriching the finish. Fudge is generally taken to be an American invention, with the earliest known references coming out of women's colleges in the late 1880s and 1890s; by the time this book appeared it was ordinary home cooking, and the fruit-and-nut version here sets a plain chocolate base with raisins and walnuts.