Home › Village Receipts › Pinochee (Two pounds of dark brown sugar)
Pinochee (Two pounds of dark brown sugar)
Two pounds of dark brown sugar, one cup of milk, one tablespoon of butter, one cup of nuts, flavoring. Dissolve the sugar in the milk, add the butter, and boil until it strings from the spoon; add the flavoring and nuts; remove from stove and stir until thick. Pour into buttered pan and cut into squares.
— Mrs. Minnie Deer
This is penuche, brown sugar fudge, written for a cook who judged candy by eye. The one thing worth adding is a thermometer.
- The hinge: cook to 238FThe hinge: cook to about 238F -- "strings from the spoon" is an old eye test for a syrup boiled to roughly the soft-ball range. On a candy thermometer aim for about 238F; much below that and it stays soft, much above and it sets hard and dry.
- Two pounds of dark brown sugarAbout 4 1/2 cups, firmly packed. Dark brown gives the molasses depth that defines penuche; light brown works but tastes flatter.
- FlavoringMost likely vanilla. Use 1 teaspoon. The recipe adds it just before the pan leaves the stove; adding it at the very end loses less flavor, since vanilla is volatile in hot syrup.
- NutsWalnuts or butternuts are plausible choices; chop them coarsely, and toast them first if you like.
- The beating stageLet the syrup cool undisturbed to about 110F before you stir. Stirring while it is still hot produces large sugar crystals and a grainy texture. Then beat until it loses its gloss and thickens, and pour promptly, as it stiffens quickly.
- Pan and cuttingAn 8-inch square pan, buttered, gives squares about 3/4 inch thick. Score while still warm and cut through when set; cold penuche shatters rather than slices.
- YieldRoughly two and a half pounds, or about three dozen squares.
- HumiditySugar candy takes up moisture from damp air and stays tacky. Make it on a dry day and store it in a tin between layers of waxed paper.
Penuche — spelled penuchi, panocha, and here pinochee — takes its name from the Mexican Spanish panocha, raw or unrefined sugar. The word traveled north and attached itself to a confection made from ordinary grocery brown sugar, milk and butter, a fixture of church suppers, fairs and fundraising cookbooks like this one. Its appeal was economy: no chocolate, no cream, nothing that a household did not already have on the shelf, and the local nut crop stirred in at the end. The wandering spellings in community cookbooks may suggest the name was passed along by ear rather than read off a package, though that is only a guess.