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Fudge (Two cups of sugar one-half cup)
Two cups of sugar, one-half cup of milk, two squares of chocolate, butter the size of a walnut, one teaspoon of vanilla. Boil ten minutes; take from fire and stir one minute.
— Miss Grace Cater
A bare-bones village fudge that assumes the cook already knows what fudge should look like. Two of the four instructions need translating before it will set properly.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clock"Boil ten minutes" depends entirely on your pan and burner. Cook to the soft-ball stage, 234-238F on a candy thermometer; below that the fudge stays a sauce, above it turns crumbly.
- The squaresA square of chocolate meant a 1-ounce block of unsweetened baking chocolate. Two squares is 2 oz. Modern bars are often 4 oz scored into quarters, so half a bar. Semi-sweet or chips will make the result cloying against two full cups of sugar.
- Butter the size of a walnutAbout a tablespoon. Lumps of fat were commonly sized by comparison to a walnut, an egg or a nut, none of them a fixed measure.
- Beating is the hingeOne minute of stirring is not enough to build the fine sugar crystals that give fudge its texture. Let the pan cool undisturbed to about 110F, then beat until the gloss dulls and the mass thickens — several minutes by hand.
- Vanilla timingAdd it during cooling rather than over heat so the flavour is not driven off. The recipe lists it with the other ingredients only because it lists everything at once.
- Don't stir while it boilsOnce the sugar dissolves, leave it alone and wipe crystals from the pan sides with a wet brush. Agitation at full heat seeds coarse grains.
- Pan and yieldUse a heavy saucepan several times the volume of the mixture; milk and sugar climb. Pours into a buttered 8x4-inch loaf pan or small square tin and gives roughly a pound, perhaps 16 pieces.
Fudge belongs to the American college-girl candy craze of the 1890s: the earliest documented recipes circulated among students at Vassar, Smith and Wellesley, made over gas jets and alcohol lamps in dormitory rooms, and the name is often linked, though not securely, to the slang sense of a botched or fudged batch of caramels. It spread from campuses into community cookbooks exactly like this one, where signed contributions from local women — Miss Grace Cater here — served as both recipe and social register. The terseness is characteristic: a cook who made boiled sugar candy often enough needed no more than four sentences.