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Marbled Fudge
2 cups of granulated sugar, 1/4 a cup of pure corn syrup, 1 1/2 cups of cream, 1 tablespoonful of butter, 2 squares of Baker's Premium No. 1 Chocolate, scraped fine or melted, 2 teaspoonfuls of vanilla.
Stir the sugar, pure corn syrup and cream over a slack fire until the sugar is melted; move the saucepan to a hotter part of the range and continue stirring until the mixture boils, then let boil, stirring every three or four minutes very gently, until the thermometer registers 236 degree F., or till a soft ball can be formed in cold water. Remove from the fire and pour one-half of the mixture over the chocolate. Set both dishes on a cake rack, or on something that will allow the air to circulate below the dishes. When the mixture cools a little get someone to beat one dish of the fudge; add a teaspoonful of vanilla to each dish, and beat until thick and slightly grainy, then put the mixture into a pan, lined with waxed paper, first a little of one and then of the other, to give a marbled effect. When nearly cold turn from the pan, peel off the paper and cut into cubes.
A standard soft-ball fudge split into two batches, one plain and one chocolate, then layered while still fluid enough to swirl. The whole recipe hinges on timing the beating: both pans have to reach the grainy stage close enough together that they can still be layered.
- The chocolateBaker's Premium No. 1 was unsweetened chocolate, sold in 1-ounce squares. Two squares means 2 oz unsweetened chocolate; do not substitute semisweet, which would throw off the sugar balance in half the batch.
- Slack fire, hotter part of the rangeOn a wood or coal range you moved the pan rather than turned a dial. Read "slack fire" as low heat until the sugar dissolves, then medium to bring it to the boil.
- 236F is the whole recipeUse a calibrated candy thermometer and check it in boiling water first; at altitude, subtract about 1F per 500 feet. A few degrees over gives hard, crumbly fudge, a few under gives a sauce that never sets.
- CreamPeriod cream was often richer than supermarket light cream, though it varied. Heavy cream at 36 percent or better suits the texture the recipe expects; half-and-half will likely make a thinner, more brittle fudge.
- Don't stir once it boilsThe instruction to stir gently every three or four minutes is a concession to uneven range heat. On a modern burner, stir only enough to keep the bottom from scorching, and wash sugar crystals down the sides of the pan with a wet brush.
- The two-dish problemThe recipe is right that you want help. Both batches cool at slightly different rates, and each is generally beaten from around 110F until it loses gloss and thickens. Once one turns, you have only a short window to get both into the pan before they set stiff.
- Pan and yieldRoughly 1 1/2 to 1 3/4 lb of fudge. An 8-inch square pan lined with parchment gives a good depth; cut into roughly 36 cubes once fully cool, which takes an hour or two at room temperature.
Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts published its little collections of Choice Recipes as advertising, and they arrived just as fudge was becoming an American craze. Fudge is generally traced to women's colleges in the 1880s and 1890s -- the usual account has Vassar, Smith and Wellesley students making it in their rooms and passing handwritten versions between schools, though much of that rests on later recollection; by the turn of the century it had moved into the standard household repertoire. The corn syrup here is a period marker as much as a technique: glucose syrup interferes with sucrose crystallization, keeping the grain fine, and it became a cheap and widely available kitchen staple in America around the turn of the twentieth century. The marbling puts the branded chocolate on visible display in every cube, which can hardly have been against the publisher's interests.