Home › Village Receipts › Pinochee (Two cups of brown sugar)
Pinochee (Two cups of brown sugar)
Two cups of brown sugar or shaved maple sugar, one-half cup of sweet cream or rich milk; boil together until it will form a soft ball when dropped in cold water; take off the stove and stir until cool, then add one pound of English walnuts chopped (hickory nuts may be used), and spread in buttered pan to cool. This candy is superior to fudge.
— Mrs. John E. Newkirk
This is penuche — a brown sugar fudge cooked to the soft-ball stage and then beaten until it grains. The recipe is sound as written; only the vocabulary and a few proportions need translating.
- Soft ball means 236–238°FSoft ball is conventionally given as 234-240F -- a candy thermometer is a useful check on the cold-water test the recipe calls for. Much below that range the candy stays soft and syrupy; much above it sets hard and crumbly.
- "Sweet cream" is unsoured creamAs distinct from the soured cream also kept in many households -- which is why the qualifier was worth writing. Heavy cream or whole milk both work; cream gives a softer, less brittle result.
- Stir until cool is the hingeThe recipe has you stir off the heat until cool; modern practice is to let it fall to around 110F before beating, then stir steadily until the gloss dulls and the mass thickens. Beating while it is still hot gives coarse, gritty crystals; not beating at all leaves you with syrup.
- Brown sugar versus mapleShaved maple sugar was cake sugar cut from a block. Granulated maple sugar can be substituted by weight; dark brown sugar gives the more familiar penuche flavour.
- A pound of nuts is generousTwo cups of sugar yields roughly a pound of candy, so a full pound of walnuts makes something closer to a nut confection than a fudge. Halving the nuts, to about 2 cups chopped, keeps it sliceable.
- Pan and yieldFor a shallower, thicker slab, a buttered loaf pan gives a better depth than a wide tin.
- Work fast at the endOnce the nuts go in the mixture stiffens within a minute or two. Have the buttered pan ready before you begin beating.
Penuche -- spelled here phonetically as "pinochee," and elsewhere panocha, penuchi or panoche -- takes its name from the Mexican Spanish panocha, a coarse unrefined brown sugar. The word appears in American cookery in the later nineteenth century and attached itself to fudge made with brown or maple sugar rather than white sugar and chocolate. The maple variant points to a sugaring district: maple sugar cakes kept far better than syrup in a farmhouse pantry, to be shaved off as needed. Mrs. Newkirk's parting claim that it is "superior to fudge" places the receipt in the decades when chocolate fudge was the fashionable novelty spreading through women's colleges and church socials, and older sugar candies were quietly defending their ground.