Candies
Sometimes it seems as though the good old-fashioned custom of making candies at home had gone out, possibly because many mothers are afraid to allow their children to eat confections and others feel that they cannot afford to buy the necessary materials. As to the first argument, remember that children are energetic little creatures, and need the fuel, in reasonable degree, that candy gives them. Besides, if they are taught to make the candy and then to clear up afterwards, they obtain a lesson in careful measurements, neatness, and in the actual use of their hands. Such candy may be served as dessert, be made on a rainy Sunday afternoon, as a great treat, or may be the reward for a specially long season of good behavior. As to the cost of the ingredients, if the child is taught to save up his pennies to buy these, instead of purchasing cheap candies from the corner store, there will soon be enough in the candy-bank for the molasses, brown or white sugar, a bottle of good extract, a can of Snowdrift, (which costs much less than butter, and furnishes fat that the child needs) and the other simple materials essential to home-candy making. 1 Tablespoonful Snowdrift 2 Cupfuls Sugar 2 Ounces (squares) Chocolate 1/2 Cupful Milk ⅛ Teaspoonful Cream of Tartar Few Grains Salt 1/2 Teaspoonful Vanilla
The ingredient list is for a plain chocolate fudge, but the book has printed it without the method that would normally follow. What it gives you is a workable set of proportions; the technique has to come from standard practice.
- No method is printedThe page breaks off after the ingredients, so there are no boiling times or temperatures at all. Treat it as a proportion list rather than a complete recipe.
- The odd fraction"18 Teaspoonful" of cream of tartar is a typesetting slip for 1/8 teaspoon. It is there to invert a little of the sugar and keep the crystals fine, not to leaven anything.
- SnowdriftA canned cottonseed-oil shortening, sold in competition with Crisco. Modern vegetable shortening is the nearest equivalent; a tablespoon of butter will do the same job with better flavour, which is precisely the substitution the book is arguing against on grounds of cost.
- Chocolate squaresTwo ounces of unsweetened baking chocolate, sold then and now in one-ounce squares. Do not use sweetened chips: the sugar is already accounted for twice over in the two cups.
- The hinge is temperature, not timeFudge sets or fails on the soft-ball stage, 234-238F. Above that it turns hard and crumbly, below it never firms. A thermometer does the work that the cold-water test would otherwise do.
- When to add the vanillaExtract goes in after the syrup comes off the heat and has cooled somewhat, along with the shortening. Added while boiling, the flavour largely evaporates.
- BeatingCool the cooked syrup undisturbed to about 110F before beating, then beat until it loses its gloss and thickens. Stirring a hot batch is what produces the grainy fudge this proportion of cream of tartar is meant to prevent.
- YieldAbout one pound, enough for a small loaf pan or a 6-inch square, cut into roughly two dozen pieces.
The headnote is doing two jobs at once: defending candy against a generation of hygiene-minded mothers, and selling a can of shortening. Snowdrift was a cottonseed-oil product of the Southern Cotton Oil Company, and this book, like scores of other branded pamphlet cookbooks of the early twentieth century, exists to put its name into domestic recipes as a matter of course — note the argument that it "costs much less than butter, and furnishes fat that the child needs." Fudge itself was still a relatively young sweet in American kitchens; its spread is generally traced to women's colleges in the 1890s, where students boiled it over gas rings in their rooms, and it moved from there into household manuals as the cheap, reliable, thermometer-free candy that a child could be trusted with. The insistence that the child save pennies for the ingredients and clean up afterwards belongs to the same period's faith in domestic science as moral training.