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Fudge (Two cups granulated sugar)
Two cups granulated sugar, one-half cup of cream or milk, onefourth cake chocolate. Boil until it hardens in cold water, stirring as little as possible; when hard add one-half teaspoon of vanilla, a pinch of salt, and beat until, creamy. Pour into buttered pans and cut into squares.
Chopped nuts may be added if desired.
— Miss Elsie L. Ruffer
A plain village fudge with almost no margin for error: the whole thing turns on the sugar temperature and on when you start beating.
- The chocolate"One-fourth cake" refers to a block of unsweetened baking chocolate, sold then in cakes of varying size, often as a half-pound block scored into squares. The quantity is genuinely ambiguous; 1 to 2 oz of unsweetened chocolate for 2 cups sugar is the sensible range, with 2 oz giving a fudge recognisable to modern palates.
- "Boil until it hardens in cold water"The text says hard, but for fudge the workable reading is the soft-ball stage, about 236-238F on a thermometer — a dropped bead should flatten between the fingers but hold together. Taken to a genuinely hard ball the batch will set up crumbly and dry.
- Cool before beatingThe instruction to beat as soon as the vanilla goes in is the one thing modern practice overturns. Let the syrup stand undisturbed until it drops to about 110F, then beat; beating hot syrup throws large sugar crystals and gives grainy fudge.
- Stirring as little as possibleThis is not fussiness. Stirring during the boil, and any sugar crystals left clinging to the pan sides, seed premature crystallisation. Wash the sides down with a wet brush once the syrup boils and then leave it alone.
- Cream or milkEither works; whole milk gives a firmer, less rich set than cream. Skim milk and non-dairy substitutes behave poorly here, since fat is what keeps the crystals fine.
- Pan and yieldAbout a pound of fudge — enough for an 8 x 4 inch loaf pan or a small square tin, cut into roughly 16 pieces. A 9-inch square pan will give you wafers.
- Knowing when to stop beatingBeat until the gloss dulls and the mass thickens and just begins to hold a mark from the spoon, then pour at once. Fudge beaten past that point sets in the bowl rather than the pan.
Fudge as a home confection is generally traced to American women's colleges in the 1880s and 1890s — Vassar, Smith and Wellesley all had fudge recipes circulating under their names — and it spread through exactly the channel this page represents: handwritten receipts swapped between neighbours and gathered up for a church or village fundraising cookbook. What made it a parlour sweet rather than a confectioner's one was the arrival of cheap granulated sugar and reliably packaged baking chocolate, which let anyone with a saucepan and a cup of cold water produce candy without special equipment. The brevity here is typical of contributed receipts: Miss Ruffer assumed her reader already knew how a cold-water test felt in the fingers, which is precisely the knowledge a thermometer now replaces.