Fudge
Combine the sugar, the chocolate, cut in small pieces, the Snowdrift, salt, cream of tartar, and milk in a sauce-pan, and stir over the heat until the sugar is dissolved.
Boil until a little of the mixture when tried in cold water forms a soft ball. Then cool until it may be dented with the finger, add the vanilla and beat until creamy.
Pour a half inch deep into a pan lightly rubbed with Snowdrift and mark into inch squares.
A straightforward boiled fudge whose method survives intact; only the branded fat and the missing quantities need translating.
- The ingredient list is not hereAs printed, the method assumes a list of amounts given elsewhere on the page. Any standard proportion works with this method — roughly 2 cups sugar, 2 oz unsweetened chocolate, 2 tablespoons fat, a pinch of salt, 1/8 teaspoon cream of tartar, 3/4 cup milk, 1 teaspoon vanilla — but the book's own figures are not recoverable from this text.
- SnowdriftA brand of cottonseed-oil shortening (hydrogenated in its later formulations), marketed to home cooks from the 1910s onward. Vegetable shortening still works; unsalted butter gives better flavour and is a common modern substitute.
- Soft ball, in numbers236–238F on a candy thermometer. The cold-water test is reliable if you keep the water genuinely cold and change it between tests, but the thermometer removes the guesswork.
- The hinge is the coolingDo not beat while the syrup is hot. Let it sit undisturbed until it is about 110F — warm but dentable, as the recipe says — then beat. Stirring a hot syrup produces coarse, gritty crystals; beating a cooled one gives the fine grain that makes fudge fudge.
- Cream of tartarIt inverts a portion of the sucrose during boiling, which keeps crystals small. Skip it and the fudge is likelier to turn sandy. Corn syrup does the same job in later recipes.
- Don't scrape the panPour, do not scrape, and avoid stirring during the boil. A single seed crystal from the pan wall can set the whole batch off prematurely.
- Pan and yieldA half-inch depth means an 8-inch square pan for the quantities above, giving about 64 one-inch squares, a little over a pound. Mark the squares while the surface is still soft; cut through once fully set.
- Humid daysFudge boiled on a damp day sets more slowly and can stay tacky. Boil to the upper end of the range rather than the lower.
Fudge is an American invention of the late nineteenth century, generally traced to the women's colleges — Vassar, Smith and Wellesley all had fudge recipes circulating by the 1890s, made over gas jets and chafing dishes in dormitory rooms, and the name is usually explained as the slang fudge, meaning a botch or a makeshift. Its appearance in a Snowdrift cook book is a piece of commercial history rather than confectionery history: Snowdrift was a cottonseed-oil shortening, a by-product industry of the Southern cotton trade, and the company published free recipe booklets through the 1910s and 1920s to persuade housewives that the new solid vegetable fat could stand in for butter and lard everywhere, including in candy where its only real job is to keep the fudge from sticking and to soften the bite.