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Fudge No. 1
1 cup white sugar 1 cup brown sugar ¼ cup syrup ½ cup sweet milk ¼ cup melted butter Boil 2 minutes, then add 2 teaspoons cocoa. Boil 5 minutes longer, then take from stove and add 1 teaspoon vanilla.
Beat till creamy, then pour in buttered pan and mark in squares.
A quick brown-sugar fudge with only a whisper of cocoa. The two published boiling times are the weak point: they assume a particular pan and stove, and the only reliable guide is temperature.
- The hinge: cook to soft ball, not to the clockSeven minutes of total boiling will not land in the same place on every stove. Cook to 236-238F on a candy thermometer, or until a drop in cold water forms a ball that flattens between the fingers. Under that and it will not set; much over and it turns hard and crumbly.
- "Syrup"Corn syrup or golden syrup — a doctoring sugar (corn syrup is a glucose syrup, golden syrup partly inverted) whose job is to interfere with crystal growth so the fudge sets smooth rather than gritty. Do not substitute maple syrup or honey without expecting a different set and flavour.
- "Sweet milk"Plain fresh whole milk, specified only to distinguish it from the sour milk or buttermilk that these books call for elsewhere in leavened batters.
- When to beatThe instruction to beat straight off the stove is the old method and it produces a coarse, sandy grain. Modern candy practice is to let the pan stand undisturbed until the mixture falls to about 110F, then beat until it loses its gloss and thickens. Stir the vanilla in at that point rather than while it is boiling hot.
- Cocoa quantityTwo teaspoons in roughly two cups of sugar gives a faint chocolate tint over a caramel base. It is closer to a penuche than to what most people now mean by fudge; 3-4 tablespoons brings it into modern range, though it will stiffen the mass slightly.
- Pan and yieldThis quantity suits a buttered 8-inch square pan for a thin slab, or a loaf tin for thicker pieces. Two cups of sugar plus syrup, butter and milk boil down to well over a pound of candy — nearer 1¼ lb — so expect three dozen or so small squares.
- Marking the squaresScore the surface while the fudge is still warm and soft. Once cool it cuts cleanly only with a hot dry knife, and by then the edges will chip.
- As a frostingThe same mixture, beaten a little less and used before it firms, spreads over a cake and sets to a fudge icing.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Winnipeg and Montreal, compiled from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives who used the company's flour, and its chapters read as a survey of what was actually being cooked in ordinary kitchens in the years around the First World War. Fudge itself was still a comparatively new sweet then: it is generally traced to American women's colleges in the 1880s and 1890s, where students are said to have made it over gas jets in their rooms, and it spread through recipe exchange and college magazines rather than through professional confectionery. That amateur origin shows in the instructions here — timed in minutes rather than degrees, at a period when a candy thermometer was far from standard kitchen equipment. Boiled sugar beaten to a cream will ice a cake or cut into squares depending only on when you stop.