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Plain Candy
Two cups of sugar and one cup of cream. Put sugar and a little cream in kettle and dissolve, then add the rest of the cream, and butter the size of a walnut; boil until done. Take off the stove, beat until cold, put in pans and mark in inch squares.
— Mrs. Price H. Perry
This is a cream fudge in its plainest form — no chocolate, no nuts, no flavoring. Everything depends on the two instructions the recipe leaves vague: how far to boil it, and how long to beat it.
- "Boil until done" means the soft-ball stageCook to 236-238F on a candy thermometer, or until a drop in cold water forms a ball that flattens between the fingers. Below that the candy will not set; much above it and it turns hard and crumbly.
- Butter the size of a walnutRoughly 1 to 2 tablespoons; period equivalents vary. The butter helps the mouthfeel and discourages boiling over, as well as adding a little richness.
- KettleA heavy-bottomed saucepan, not a stockpot or a modern tea kettle. Use one at least three times the volume of the mixture; sugar and cream climb hard when they boil.
- CreamCream from a home dairy was generally thicker than most bottled cream today; heavy cream (around 36% fat) is the closest modern match. Half-and-half or milk will work but gives a thinner, grainier result.
- Dissolve first, then stop stirringDissolving the sugar in a little cream before adding the rest matters: undissolved crystals on the pan wall can seed a gritty batch. Once it boils, leave it alone; washing the sides down with a wet brush is a modern refinement.
- Beat until cold — this is the hingeLet the pan cool undisturbed to about 110F before beating, then beat steadily until the gloss dulls and the mass thickens. Beating while hot produces large crystals and a sandy texture; the whole difference between fudge and grainy sugar is here.
- Pans and markingPour into a buttered shallow pan and score into 1-inch squares while still soft; once fully set it will crack rather than cut cleanly.
- YieldTwo cups of sugar with a cup of cream makes roughly 1 pound; the number of inch squares depends on the size and depth of the pan used. Keeps a week in a tin, not the refrigerator.
"Plain candy" is a plainer contemporaneous version of fudge, and its appearance in a recipe collection says a good deal about the kitchens that produced it: sugar was cheap by then, cream came from a neighbor's cow or one's own, and a confection needing no chocolate, no nuts and no special mold could be made in an afternoon from what was already in the house. Fudge itself is traditionally traced to American women's colleges in the 1880s and 1890s, where the recipe is said to have spread by hand-copied letter, and versions of it turn up in community cookbooks. Contributors like Mrs. Perry were not writing for strangers — "boil until done" and "butter the size of a walnut" assumed a reader who had watched someone else do it, which is why the two hardest judgments in candy making, the boil and the beat, get one clause apiece.