Vassar Fudge
2 cups of white granulated sugar, 1 tablespoonful of butter, 1 cup of cream, 1/4 a cake of Baker's Premium No. 1 Chocolate.
Put in the sugar and cream, and when this becomes hot put in the chocolate, broken up into fine pieces. Stir vigorously and constantly. Put in butter when it begins to boil. Stir until it creams when beaten on a saucer. Then remove and beat until quite cool and pour into buttered tins. When cold cut in diamond-shaped pieces.
A plain three-ingredient fudge that stands or falls on one thing: cooking the syrup to the right temperature and then beating it at the right moment. A candy thermometer removes all the guesswork the original leaves in.
- The chocolateBaker's Premium No. 1 was an unsweetened chocolate sold in 8-ounce cakes, so a quarter cake is 2 ounces. Modern Baker's unsweetened chocolate is the direct descendant; 2 ounces of any unsweetened baking chocolate works.
- The cream'cream' in period recipes was not standardised and could mean thin as well as thick cream. Heavy cream is the safer choice here; lower-fat dairy gives a thinner, grainier fudge.
- "Creams when beaten on a saucer"A drop chilled on a cold saucer is worked with a spoon to see whether it thickens and grains rather than staying syrupy. This falls around the soft-ball stage, roughly 234-240°F on a thermometer; how long it takes depends on the pan and the heat.
- The hinge — when to beatTake the pan off the heat and let it cool undisturbed to roughly 110°F before beating. Beating while hot produces coarse crystals and a gritty texture; beating cooled syrup produces the fine grain that makes fudge fudge.
- Stirring before the boilThe vigorous constant stirring matters only until the sugar dissolves and the chocolate is smooth. Once it is boiling, stirring encourages crystals to form on the pan sides; wipe them down with a wet brush instead.
- Pan and pouringPour the moment it thickens and loses its gloss — it sets fast. A buttered 8-inch square pan gives a slab around ½ inch thick, deep enough to cut into diamonds.
- YieldAbout 1¼ pounds, or roughly 30 small pieces. It keeps a week in a tin at room temperature, covered.
Fudge belongs to the American women's colleges of the 1890s, and Vassar is often named among the schools where it spread: the sweet was made over spirit lamps and gas jets in dormitory rooms and passed between students in handwritten copies. Vassar, Wellesley and Smith fudge all circulated as distinct formulas, and the Vassar version — sugar, cream, butter, unsweetened chocolate, nothing else — is the plainest of them. Walter Baker & Co., the Dorchester, Massachusetts firm, collected recipes that called for its chocolate by product name and gave them away to build demand, and a candy already famous among college students was ideal advertising. The instruction to test a drop on a saucer, rather than read a thermometer, marks the period; household candy thermometers were still uncommon in American kitchens at the turn of the century.