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Candies and Candy Making: Brown
Brown in a slow oven.
Or to 1 pound of sweet almonds, blanched and bruised with a little water, add 1¼ pounds of sugar, the whites of 6 eggs and 2 grated lemon peels. Brown in a slow oven.
Or, for pistachio macaroons, beat CANDIES AND CANDY MAKING 6 up with the whites of 2 eggs 4 ounces of pounded bitter almonds, 12 ounces of Confectioners' XXX sugar, 6 ounces of shelled pistachio kernels, 1 tablespoonful of orange or vanilla sugar. Brown in a slow oven.
FUDGE Plain Fudge.-Mix two cups granulated sugar, two squares chocolate and 1½ teaspoon cream of tartar with one cup of milk or water, and place over a hot fire. Stir the mixture steadily until it comes to a boil, and continue stirring at intervals while boiling to prevent chocolate from settling and sticking to the kettle. Boil to the soft ball degree, remove the saucepan to a cool place and let stand until it becomes lukewarm. Add one teaspoon vanilla and beat the mixture until it sets. While still warm pour it to cool into a well buttered tin and before it cools cut into squares to serve. The secret of making good fudge lies in not boiling it too long and in beating it very thoroughly to make it fine and soft instead of granular.
This page runs the tail of a run of almond macaroon variants straight into a plain chocolate fudge. The macaroon variants cannot be made as written; the fudge is sound and repays a candy thermometer.
- Bitter almondsThe pistachio macaroon calls for 4 ounces of pounded bitter almonds. Bitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and moistened, and four ounces is far past any tolerable dose. Their sale untreated is restricted in the United States for exactly this reason. Baking does not reliably drive off the cyanide, and no adjustment to the quantity makes this recipe worth attempting; use a current macaroon recipe instead.
- The sugar figure in the sweet-almond versionThe printed page was checked: the sweet-almond version calls for 1¼ pounds of sugar to 1 pound of almonds, which is what our text now gives. That falls within the usual range for macaroons of this type.
- A slow ovenRoughly 275-300F. Macaroons of this kind are dried and lightly coloured rather than baked through, so the low setting is deliberate.
- Squares of chocolateA square is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so two squares is 2 oz. Modern unsweetened chocolate is a close match to what the book meant; do not substitute semisweet without cutting the sugar.
- Cream of tartarOne and a half teaspoons is a great deal for two cups of sugar and will invert enough sucrose to leave the fudge soft and slow to set. A pinch to a quarter teaspoon is nearer the usual amount for a batch this size.
- Soft ball, in numbers234-240F on a thermometer. The cold-water test the book assumes is workable but coarse; at 240F the fudge will be firm and cut cleanly, at 234F distinctly soft.
- The hinge: cool before beatingLetting the syrup drop to lukewarm, around 110F, before stirring is what produces small sugar crystals and a smooth texture. Beating a hot syrup gives coarse, grainy fudge, which is the failure the last sentence is warning against. Do not stir or scrape the pan during the cooling.
- YieldTwo cups of sugar makes roughly a pound of fudge. The book names no tin size; a pound will be fairly thin spread in an 8-inch square.
Fudge is one of the few confections with a plausibly American and specifically collegiate origin: it is generally traced to women's colleges in the northeastern United States in the 1880s and 1890s, where students made it over gas jets and spirit lamps in their rooms, and the recipe spread through college cookbooks under names like Vassar and Smith fudge. It sits oddly beside the almond macaroons above it, which belong to a far older European confectioner's tradition of sugar-and-nut pastes worked with egg white and dried in a cooling oven. Household encyclopaedias of this period tended to lump both under "candies," since both were things a family could produce at home without the copper pans and marble slabs of a professional trade. The insistence on beating thoroughly is the book's nod to the one thing a home cook could control without instruments: crystal size, and with it whether the fudge came out silky or sandy.