Fudges

A standard turn-of-the-century fudge, written for cooks who judged doneness by dropping syrup into cold water. The one thing the original leaves out is the temperature, and that is the whole recipe.

• Cook to a numberBoil the sugar, milk, butter and chocolate to the soft-ball stage, 234-240F on a candy thermometer. Below that the fudge will not set; much above it and the finished sheet turns dry and crumbly.
• Squares of chocolateA square meant a 1 oz block of unsweetened baking chocolate, so 2 oz total. Modern bars are often scored at 1 oz per section; semisweet or chips will make the batch cloyingly sweet against 4 cupfuls of sugar.
• Butter the size of a walnutRoughly 1 tablespoon, or about half an ounce. Precision does not matter here; the butter is for flavour and to discourage sticking, not for structure.
• Milk, not evaporatedWhole milk is what is meant. Later fudge recipes often turned to evaporated or condensed milk, which behaves differently in the pan; plain milk is what this one assumes.
• Stir while boiling, then stopOnce the syrup reaches temperature, take it off the heat and let it fall to about 110F before beating. Beating a hot syrup produces coarse, gritty crystals; the instruction to stir until almost hard is what creates the fine grain, and it wants a cooled mixture.
• Add vanilla off the heatA teaspoon or so, stirred in as the pan cools rather than during the boil, where the alcohol and aroma cook away.
• PouringWork quickly at the end. Once the mass loses its gloss and stiffens against the spoon it sets fast; scrape it into buttered pans -- an 8-inch square will take the batch -- and score it into squares before it hardens fully.
• YieldAbout 1 3/4 lb of candy, or roughly 36 small squares from an 8-inch pan.