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Cocoanut Fudge
Two cups of brown sugar, one-half cup of milk, two ounces of butter, one-half teaspoon of Larkin Flavoring Extract, one cup of Larkin Shredded Cocoanut. Put sugar and milk over fire until the boiling point is reached, add butter and cook until it nearly strings. Take from fire, add Extract and Cocoanut, and stir until it snaps. Pour quickly into buttered tin; cool and cut into squares.
A penuche-style fudge, brown sugar rather than chocolate, thickened by beating rather than by any thermometer reading. The whole recipe hinges on two vague phrases about the syrup, so read those first.
- "Nearly strings"Cook the syrup to just short of the point where it spins a thread from the spoon. The original gives no temperature; the thread stage is conventionally placed around 230-235F, below the soft-ball stage most modern fudge recipes call for. Judge it by dropping a little syrup into cold water rather than by the clock.
- "Stir until it snaps"Not a standard candy term. The likely sense is that off the heat you beat the mixture until it loses its gloss, thickens, and holds the mark of the spoon. Pour the moment it does, or it will set in the pan.
- Larkin Flavoring ExtractThe Larkin Company sold a house line of extracts by mail; vanilla is the safe reading here. Half a teaspoon in two cups of sugar is restrained by modern taste, and a full teaspoon is not out of place.
- Larkin Shredded CocoanutShredded coconut of this period was typically sold unsweetened and drier than the bagged sweetened flake now common, though sweetened kinds did exist. Unsweetened desiccated or shredded coconut is the closer match; sweetened flake pushes an already very sweet candy further and adds moisture.
- Two ounces of butterFour tablespoons, half a stick. Add it after the boil begins, as written, and do not stir it in vigorously while the syrup is still cooking.
- Pan and heatUse a heavy saucepan at least three times the volume of the ingredients, over medium heat. Milk and brown sugar scorch readily, and a scorched batch cannot be rescued.
- Yield and tinAbout a pound of candy. An 8x4 loaf tin gives a thick slab; an 8x8 pan gives thinner squares. Butter it well and score the surface while the fudge is still warm, then cut when fully cool.
Good Things to Eat belongs to a genre of promotional cookery books issued by companies that sold groceries and household goods direct to the customer, and the Larkin Company of Buffalo, New York, was among the largest of them, starting in soap and expanding into extracts, spices, coconut and premiums earned with orders. That is why the ingredient list names Larkin flavoring and Larkin coconut rather than simply vanilla and coconut. Fudge itself was still a comparatively new sweet in America when books like this appeared, generally traced to the women's colleges of the northeastern United States in the 1880s and 1890s, where batches were made in dormitory rooms and the recipes passed around in letters. This one is a brown sugar version, closer to what is often called penuche.