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Candies and Candy Making: Fudge
Recipes giving the number of minutes to boil fudge are suggestive but require the use of good judgment. Fudge should always be boiled to the soft ball degree, which may be tested by dropping half a teaspoonful into cold water. If this can be rolled into a soft ball with the fingers without sticking, the fudge is done. It should then be removed from the fire to a cool place, allowed to stand until it becomes lukewarm and then stirred or beaten until the mixture sets. Some actual experience and observation is necessary to know just when to remove the fudge from the fire and also when to cease stirring and pour it into the pan, but with ordinary pains anyone can make good fudge from the following recipes.
A great variety of excellent candies may be made by adding to plain fudge nut meats and other toothsome dainties of different kinds. Several of the best known and most popular recipes for fudge are as follows, but if the directions given for plain fudge are closely followed, these may be altered or modified by experiment in other particulars almost at will.
Smith College Fudge. -Boil for about five minutes or to the soft ball degree, three cups granulated sugar, 3/4 cup milk, and two squares chocolate. Remove from the fire, let cool until lukewarm, and beat in a piece of butter the size of an egg and one teaspoon vanilla.
Nut Fudge. - Use either of the foregoing recipes, but when stirring in the flavoring add also one cup of any kind or assortment of nut meats.
Marshmallow Fudge. - Follow either of the foregoing recipes with or without the nut meats and beat in also one cup of marshmallows cut fine. Scatter evenly over a buttered tin in which the fudge is poured out to cool, another cup of chopped marshmallows. Cut into squares to serve. Fudge Nougat.-Boil together to the soft ball degree, 2 cups granulated sugar, 1 cup milk, 1 tablespoon butter, and a pinch of salt. Remove from the fire, add the juice of half an orange, beat one minute and add one cup raisins, figs, and chopped nuts mixed together. Pour out to cool into a buttered pan, and cut into squares to serve.
Lemon Cocoanut Fudge.-Boil together for 12 minutes 1 lb. granulated sugar, juice of 2 lemons, grated rind of 1 lemon, 1/2 cup cocoanut and a piece of butter the size of an English walnut. Remove from the fire and beat to the consistency of cream.
Pour to cool on buttered tins and cut into squares to serve.
Sultana Fudge.-Boil together to the soft ball degree 3 cups granulated sugar, ½ cup milk, 2 cups molasses, and 2 squares chocolate. Remove from the fire and thoroughly beat in 1/2 cup nut meats and 1/2 cup Sultana raisins. When the mixture thickens, turn out into a buttered pan and cut into squares to serve.
The headnote is the real recipe here: everything depends on reading the soft-ball stage and on not stirring too early. The individual formulas are variations on that one technique.
- Soft ball, in numbersSoft ball is 235-240F on a candy thermometer. The cold-water test described is reliable but slow; a thermometer clipped to the pan, with the bulb in the syrup and off the bottom, removes most of the guesswork the author warns about.
- Ignore the stated minutes"About five minutes" and "12 minutes" reflect one particular stove and pan. A wide pan on high heat can hit temperature in four minutes; a narrow one on a modern low burner may take fifteen. Cook to temperature, not to the clock.
- Squares of chocolateA square meant one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, which is still sold in one-ounce squares. Two squares with three cups of sugar gives a mild, pale fudge by current tastes; semisweet chips are not a substitute at that ratio.
- Butter by comparisonA piece the size of an egg is about 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. The size of an English walnut is about 1 tablespoon. In the Smith College recipe the butter is beaten in after the syrup has cooled; the Fudge Nougat and Lemon Cocoanut recipes boil their butter with the sugar.
- Lukewarm means 110FThis is the hinge. Beating hot syrup produces coarse, gritty crystals; letting it fall to about 110F undisturbed, then beating, gives the fine grain fudge depends on. Do not scrape the pan sides or stir during cooling, and pour into a buttered 8-inch square pan the moment the gloss dulls and the mass stiffens.
- Lemon Cocoanut Fudge is not fudgeWith no milk and no butterfat to speak of, the lemon juice is the only liquid, so this behaves as a stiff sugar-crystal candy and will scorch quickly. Watch it closely and expect a firmer, whiter result than the milk-based batches.
- Cocoanut and SultanasUse unsweetened dried shredded coconut; modern sweetened flake will push the sugar higher. Sultanas are golden raisins.
- MarshmallowsPeriod marshmallows were denser and less aerated than bagged ones, which is why the recipe says to cut them fine. Miniature marshmallows fold in without cutting, though they melt into the warm mass rather than staying distinct.
- YieldThe three-cup sugar batches fill an 8-inch square pan and cut into roughly 36 pieces. The Sultana version, with molasses added, makes closer to double and sets noticeably softer because molasses carries invert sugar.
Fudge belongs to the American women's colleges of the 1880s and 1890s, and the naming hints at it: this page gives a Smith College Fudge, while Vassar and Wellesley had fudge attached to their names in other collections. It was made over a gas jet or a chafing dish in a dormitory room where cooking was usually forbidden. The origin story generally traced to Vassar credits a student, Emelyn Battersby Hartridge, with circulating a recipe in the late 1880s, though the documentation is thin, and the name itself is older slang for a botch or a fake, possibly a nod to fudge being an easier, less exacting relative of fondant and caramel. The candy spread through college and church cookbooks in the 1890s and reached household compendiums like this one already codified into a base recipe plus a list of additions. The author's insistence that timings are only 'suggestive' is a reminder that home candy thermometers were still uncommon; judgment of the cold-water test was the skill being taught.