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Milk Chocolate
1 cup rich milk 4 teaspoons cocoa or grated chocolate. 1 tablespoon butter 2 cups granulated sugar 1 teaspoon vanilla extract Mix well together milk, sugar and cocoa, and boil until a small quantity stirred in a saucer becomes a creamy substance. Remove from the fire and add a tablespoon good butter and a teaspoon vanilla. Beat thoroughly until cool, and pour into a pie tin.
Despite its place among the pudding sauces, this is fudge: a boiled sugar candy set in a pie tin and cut in squares. Everything depends on where you stop the boiling.
- The hinge: stop at soft-ballThe saucer test is checking for soft-ball stage, 234-240F on a candy thermometer. Below that the fudge will not set; much above it and you get a dry, crumbly slab.
- "Rich milk"Pre-homogenization milk with the cream left in. Whole milk works, but half-and-half is closer to the intent and less likely to scorch.
- Cocoa quantityFour teaspoons of cocoa to two cups of sugar is very lean by modern taste. Three to four tablespoons of unsweetened cocoa, or 2 oz of grated unsweetened chocolate, gives the chocolate flavour a reader would now expect.
- Butter and vanilla go in off the heatAs written. Added to boiling syrup the butter would spit and the vanilla's flavour would largely cook away. Some modern methods go further and leave the butter sitting on top, unstirred, until the mixture has cooled.
- Cool before beating"Beat thoroughly until cool" is backwards from best practice. Let the pan stand undisturbed to about 110F, then beat. Beating hot syrup produces large sugar crystals and a grainy candy.
- ScorchingMilk and sugar catch easily. Use a heavy-bottomed pan, stir until the sugar dissolves, then stir only occasionally, and wipe crystals from the sides with a wet brush.
- The pan and the yieldA pie tin means a shallow round tin, probably eight or nine inches across; butter it first. Two cups of sugar plus the butter and milk solids should give something in the region of a pound of fudge, enough for thirty-odd small squares. Score it while still warm.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to promote its flour, and was compiled from recipes contributed by users of the flour across Canada. The name "milk chocolate" here seems to describe the method rather than any product: cocoa boiled with milk and sugar. Fudge itself is generally traced to American women's colleges in the 1880s and 1890s, where it spread by handwritten recipe and reached print in much this form -- a short paragraph, no thermometer, and a saucer of cold syrup as the only test.