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Fudges and Caramels: Fudge
BURNT ALMOND FUDGE Brown blanched almonds in the oven and chop rather coarsely. Brown one-half cupful of granulated sugar in a granite pan; then add two-thirds cupful of milk, and when the browned sugar is thoroughly dissolved add one cupful of granulated sugar and one tablespoonful of butter. Boil until it makes a firm ball when dropped in cold water; flavor with almond extract and add one cupful of the browned almonds; stir until creamy, then pour into pans and mark off into squares.
COFFEE FUDGE Take two cupfuls of granulated sugar, one cupful of strong boiled coffee, one-half cupful of cream and a teaspoonful of butter. Boil to the soft ball stage, then add a cupful of chopped nut meats, and stir until creamy. Pour into pans and cut into squares. The nuts may be omitted if desired. MARSHMALLOW FUDGE Take two cupfuls of light brown sugar, a cupful of milk, a tablespoonful of butter, and a fourth teaspoonful of cream of tartar. Boil until it threads or to 235 degrees, and then add a half pound of marshmallows. Beat until dissolved, add a cupful of chopped walnut meats. Pour into buttered pans and cut into squares. Another way to make this fudge is to omit the nuts and add two squares of chocolate.
PEANUT FUDGE Take two cupfuls of brown sugar, one cupful of milk, and one teaspoonful of butter. When oily nuts are used in fudge one does not need to use so much butter. Boil to the thread or soft ball stage, and then add one cupful of finely ground peanuts and one teaspoonful vanilla. If preferred peanut butter may be used. Beat up until creamy, pour into buttered pans, and cut into squares.
FIG FUDGE Take two cupfuls of granulated sugar, one cupful of water, a fourth teaspoonful of cream of tartar, one-half pound of figs, one teaspoonful of ginger, and one tablespoonful of butter. Boil the mixture to the soft ball stage. Remove from the fire and beat up until creamy. Pour into a buttered pan and mark into squares. Chop the figs before adding.
DIVINITY FUDGE Take two cupfuls of light brown sugar, add one-half cupful of golden corn syrup, and one-half cupful of water. Boil to the hard ball stage. Add one cupful of chopped walnut meats, and one teaspoonful of vanilla; and then pour over the stiffly beaten whites of two eggs. Beat up until light and foamy. Pour into buttered pans, and when cool mark off into squares. COCOANUT FUDGE Take two cupfuls of granulated sugar, one cupful of milk, one tablespoonful of butter, and one-fourth teaspoonful of cream of tartar. Boil to the thread or soft ball stage and then add one cupful of grated cocoanut. Beat up until quite creamy.
Seven fudge variations that assume you know the cold-water tests by feel. The temperatures given here are the ones a candy thermometer needs, and the one instruction the book leaves out is when to stop stirring.
- Cook to a number, not a descriptionSoft ball is 234-240F, firm ball 244-248F, hard ball 250-266F. The book's "boil until it threads or to 235 degrees" conflates two different stages — the thread stage is 230-234F, so treat 234-238F as the target for the marshmallow, peanut and cocoanut fudges.
- Cool before beatingThis is the hinge. Pour the finished syrup into a buttered pan or bowl and let it fall to about 110F before you beat it. Beating a hot syrup gives coarse, gritty crystals; beating a cooled one gives the fine grain that makes fudge fudge.
- Granite panGranite ware is speckled enamel over steel — a plain heavy saucepan. Use one with a light interior so you can judge the colour of the caramelizing sugar in the burnt almond fudge, and one at least three times the volume of the syrup, since milk mixtures foam up hard.
- Burnt sugarMelt the half cup of sugar dry over medium heat until it is the colour of an old penny, then add the milk off the heat and stand back — it will spit violently. Return to low heat and stir until the hardened caramel has fully redissolved before the remaining sugar goes in.
- Squares of chocolateA "square" is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so two squares is 2 oz. The recipe does not say when it goes in; adding it with the marshmallows lets the residual heat melt it.
- Marshmallows and cocoanutHalf a pound of marshmallows is 8 oz by weight, roughly 4 to 5 cups of modern miniatures; a 7 oz jar of marshmallow creme is sometimes substituted, though it is not an exact equivalent. "Grated cocoanut" means fresh or unsweetened dried; sweetened flaked coconut will push these already very sweet batches over the edge.
- DivinityPour the 250F syrup over the beaten whites in a thin steady stream with the mixer running, not all at once, and beat until the mass holds its shape and loses its gloss. The whites are cooked only by the syrup's heat, so use pasteurized whites if that matters to you. Divinity is notoriously unreliable in humid weather and may refuse to set.
- Fig fudgeThe recipe never says when the figs go in: it lists them with the ingredients, tells you to boil "the mixture" to soft ball, then adds "Chop the figs before adding" as an afterthought. Stirring the chopped figs and the ginger in during the beating is the easiest reading. Dried figs, stemmed; a half pound is about 1 1/2 cups chopped.
- YieldEach of these makes something over a pound of candy, comfortably filling an 8-inch square pan and marking into about 36 small squares. Mark the squares while the fudge is still warm and cut through once fully set.
Fudge belongs to the American college-girl kitchen of the 1890s and 1900s: it is traditionally traced to the women's colleges of the Northeast, where Vassar, Smith and Wellesley students made it over gas jets and chafing dishes in their rooms, and where the recipe circulated in handwritten copies alongside printed versions. That origin explains the shape of this page: fudge asks for no mould, no dipping fork and no marble slab, only a pan, a spoon and enough patience to beat the syrup. The variations here also show what an American pantry looked like: marshmallows and corn syrup sold by the package, peanut butter recently industrialized and cheap, dried figs and coconut as everyday grocery items rather than luxuries. The book also slips between the "thread" and "soft ball" stages, at a time when household thermometers were becoming common but cooks still trusted the cold-water test they had learned by hand.