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Chocolate Fudge
Two cups of sugar, three-fourths cup of milk, one square of chocolate, butter size of an egg. Boil ten minutes, then take off stove and beat until thick; add flavoring.
— Miss Henrietta Egnor
A plain village fudge from the era before candy thermometers were common, so the one thing it does not tell you is the only thing that matters: the temperature at which you stop boiling.
- Boil to temperature, not to the clockTen minutes is a guess that depends on your pan, your burner and your altitude. Cook to the soft-ball stage, 236-238F on a candy thermometer; under that the fudge never sets, over it and it turns dry and crumbly.
- One square of chocolateChocolate was sold in cakes scored into 1-ounce squares, so this means about 1 oz of unsweetened baking chocolate. With two cups of sugar the result is barely chocolate by modern taste; two squares is closer to what most people now expect from fudge.
- Butter the size of an eggRoughly 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Old cookbooks used the egg as a volume standard and it is reliable enough here, since the butter is for texture and flavor rather than structure.
- FlavoringVanilla, about a teaspoon, added off the heat so the alcohol does not flash off. Add it after the mixture has cooled somewhat, not the instant it leaves the burner.
- Cool before beatingThe recipe says take off the stove and beat, but fudge beaten while very hot goes grainy. Let it cool undisturbed to about 110F, when the pan is warm rather than hot to the hand, then beat until it loses its gloss and thickens.
- Do not stir while boilingOnce the sugar has dissolved, leave it alone and wash any crystals from the sides of the pan with a wet brush. Stray crystals seed the whole batch and produce a sandy texture.
- Pan and yieldSomething over a pound of candy. Pour into a buttered 8x4-inch loaf pan or a small square pan, and score it into squares while it is still soft.
Fudge in this form is an American invention of the late nineteenth century, generally traced to women's colleges in the northeastern states, where students boiled sugar and milk over gas jets and spirit lamps in their rooms; recipes are said, on the evidence of a handful of surviving student accounts, to have circulated by letter under the names of Vassar, Smith and Wellesley long before they reached print. That timing explains why a book of village receipts carries one: fudge was new, cheap and needed no oven, and its ingredients — sugar, milk, butter, a square of baking chocolate — were all things a country kitchen already had. Attribution to a named neighbor, as here to Miss Henrietta Egnor, was a common form in community cookbooks, where a receipt's authority came from the woman who was known to make it well.