Home › Date-Cocoanut › Date Fudge
Date Fudge
To two cups of granulated sugar add two-thirds of a cup of sweet milk and one-third cup butter. Add one teaspoonful of vanilla when the syrup has begun to simmer. Stir this until just after the vanilla has been added, then let cook for twenty-five minutes without stirring, watching carefully, however, that it does not burn. When a light brown in colour pour out on plates on which are spread chopped or halved dates and let cool.
A simple boiled milk-sugar fudge poured over dates rather than mixed with them. The recipe gives a time instead of a temperature, which is the one thing worth correcting.
- Use a thermometer, not the clockTwenty-five minutes assumes a particular pan, burner and quantity. Cook to 236-238F (soft-ball stage), but judge the colour separately: the "light brown" the recipe wants comes from the milk solids browning, which need not coincide exactly with that temperature.
- "Sweet milk"Ordinary fresh whole milk, specified to distinguish it from the sour or buttermilk that older recipes also called for. Two-thirds cup whole milk is right; skim will scorch more readily.
- Pan and heatUse a heavy saucepan at least three times the volume of the ingredients, as milk and sugar foam up considerably. Medium heat throughout, and stir only until the sugar has dissolved.
- Add the vanilla laterThe original stirs vanilla in as the syrup begins to simmer, but twenty-five minutes of boiling drives most of it off. Adding it off the heat, once the fudge has stopped bubbling, gives far more flavour.
- Why no stirringAgitating a hot supersaturated syrup seeds large sugar crystals and turns fudge grainy. Leave it alone once it boils, and do not scrape the crystallised ring from the sides of the pan into the finished candy.
- Watch the milk solidsThe milk proteins brown and then burn quickly at the end. Once the colour starts to shift, it moves fast; pull the pan the moment it is right.
- The platesButter or line them first. Spread the dates in a single layer so the syrup runs between them and sets as a slab, then cut into squares while still warm.
- YieldThe recipe does not say how many dates; with about a cup of them, two cups of sugar should give something over a pound of candy, perhaps 24 to 30 small squares.
Fudge as a distinct American confection dates from the late nineteenth century and spread rapidly through women's colleges in the 1890s, where it could be made over a chafing dish or gas ring without a proper kitchen; recipes circulated in manuscript and student magazines before they reached print. This one belongs to the same moment as the growing trade in imported Middle Eastern dates, which arrived in American grocery stores as pressed blocks and boxed layers and were sold as a cheap, sweet, keeping fruit. Fruit-recipe collections of the period appear to include such pairings, dates with cocoanut, with nuts, with caramel, attempts to find domestic uses for the fruit. Pouring the hot syrup over the fruit rather than stirring it in keeps the dates whole and distinct, a technique closer to nut brittle than to modern mixed fudge.