Cocoa Fudge
1/2 a cup of milk, 3 level tablespoonfuls of butter, 2 1/2 cups of powdered sugar, 6 tablespoonfuls of Baker's Breakfast Cocoa, Pinch of salt, 1 teaspoonful of vanilla.
Mix all ingredients together but vanilla; cook, stirring constantly, until it begins to boil, then cook slowly, stirring occasionally, eight or ten minutes, or until it makes a firm ball when dropped in cold water. When cooked enough, add the vanilla and beat until it seems like very cold molasses in winter. Pour into a buttered pan; when firm, cut in squares. Great care must be taken not to beat too much, because it cannot be poured into the pan, and will not have a gloss on top.
A cocoa fudge rather than a chocolate one, and the recipe's own closing warning is the part that decides whether it works. Everything before it is a boiled syrup; everything after it is a judgement about when to stop.
- "Powdered sugar" is not confectioners' sugar"Powdered sugar" is not modern confectioners' sugar -- in American books of this period the term usually meant a sugar ground finer than granulated, without the cornstarch added to today's icing sugar. Ordinary granulated sugar is the safer reading for the boiled fudge; modern confectioners' sugar behaves differently in a cooked syrup.
- The firm-ball stageThe cold-water test given is the real instruction: a ball that holds its shape when lifted out, roughly 244-248F on a thermometer. Eight to ten minutes is a guide only, since it depends entirely on your pan and burner.
- Cool before beatingDo not over-beat -- the warning at the end of the fudge recipe is the hinge of the whole thing. Stop the moment it loses its gloss and thickens "like very cold molasses in winter"; beat past that point and it sets in the pan you are beating it in. The original starts beating straight after the vanilla goes in; modern practice is to let the syrup drop to about 110F first.
- Cocoa, not block chocolateSix tablespoonfuls of Breakfast Cocoa and no Premium No. 1 anywhere in it. Because cocoa has had most of its cocoa butter pressed out, this sets firmer and reads drier than the chocolate fudges nearby, and it takes its gloss from the beating rather than from fat.
- Beat it in the pan, by handA wooden spoon against the side of the pan is how this was done, and it is still the safer method, because you can feel the moment the mixture stiffens. A stand mixer runs straight past that moment, and the recipe is explicit about what happens then.
- Have the pan ready firstOnce it turns you have seconds, not minutes. Butter a shallow pan -- eight inches square suits this quantity -- before you start beating, not after.
Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts -- a chocolate mill in operation since the late eighteenth century -- issued Choice Recipes and its successors as advertising booklets, distributing them free to promote Breakfast Cocoa and Premium No. 1 Chocolate. The commercial purpose shows in every line: the brand name is repeated inside the instructions themselves, and the contributors are named cooks whose reputations carried weight. Fudge itself belongs to the same moment -- generally traced to American women's colleges in the 1880s and 1890s, where it spread as a chafing-dish confection made in dormitories -- and its appearance in a cocoa booklet marks the point at which a student novelty had become a standard household sweet. Vassar, Smith and Wellesley all have fudges of their own a few pages further on.