Double Fudge
2 cups of granulated sugar, 1/2 a cup of cream, 2 squares of Baker's Premium No. 1 Chocolate, 1 tablespoonful of butter.
Boil seven minutes; then beat and spread in buttered tin to cool. 2 cups of brown sugar, 1/2 a cup of cream, 1 teaspoonful of vanilla extract, 1 cup of walnut meats chopped fine, Butter size of a walnut. Boil ten minutes; then beat and pour on top of fudge already in pan. When cool, cut in squares.
Two separate batches of fudge poured one on the other: a plain chocolate layer beneath, a brown-sugar penuche with walnuts above. The timings given are the weak point, and everything else follows from fixing them.
- Boil to temperature, not to the clock"Boil seven minutes" and "boil ten minutes" assume a particular pan, burner and batch size. Both layers are soft-ball fudge and want 236-238F on a candy thermometer; on a wide modern pan seven minutes may overshoot badly, and on a heavy one it may not get there at all.
- Baker's Premium No. 1This was the company's unsweetened baking chocolate, sold in one-ounce squares. Two squares is 2 oz unsweetened chocolate; do not substitute semisweet without cutting the sugar.
- CreamPeriod 'cream' was not standardised and could be anywhere from thin to thick. Heavy cream works for both layers, about 1/2 cup each, as the recipe specifies.
- Butter size of a walnutRoughly 1 tablespoon, the same as the measured tablespoon in the first layer.
- The hinge: cool before beatingBeating a hot syrup gives coarse, grainy sugar crystals. Take each batch off the heat and let it fall to about 110F undisturbed, then beat until it thickens and loses its gloss. The recipe's "then beat" hides this entirely.
- Vanilla goes in off the heatAdd it with the nuts once the second batch has cooled toward beating temperature, or the alcohol carries most of the flavor off.
- Getting the layers to bondSpread the chocolate layer and let it set only until firm to the touch, not cold and hard. Pour the brown-sugar layer over it while the base is still slightly warm, or the two will separate when cut.
- Pan and yieldAn 8-inch square tin, buttered, is right for this quantity. It makes roughly 2 lb of candy, about 36 squares. Score it while still faintly warm and cut through when fully cool.
Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, one of the oldest chocolate firms in the country, gave away small recipe booklets like Choice Recipes to sell its chocolate and cocoa, and several editions drew on contributions from well-known cookery teachers of the day, Maria Parloa and Fannie Farmer among them. Fudge itself was new enough at the time to feel modern: it is generally traced to American women's colleges in the 1880s and 1890s, where Vassar, Smith and Wellesley each claimed a version, and accounts describe it spreading through handwritten copies passed between students before it reached print. The second layer here is what would elsewhere be called penuche or panocha, a brown-sugar fudge whose flavour comes from the molasses left in the sugar.