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Chocolate Fudge (Squares bitter chocolate C)
2 squares bitter chocolate 1/2 C milk 1/3 C Karo syrup 2 T butter 1 t vanilla Grate chocolate and mix with all ingredients except vanilla. Cook slowly, stirring only before it begins to boil. When a soft ball is formed when a little is dropped into cold water remove from fire. Set aside to cool until it wrinkles around the edges. Add vanilla and beat until creamy. Pour into buttered pan and when set, mark off into squares. Nuts may be added to good advantage.
Mrs. R. M. Dillon.
A cooked fudge in the older style, filed under icings because the same batter, caught a little earlier, spreads over a cake. One caution before you start: as printed, there is no sugar in the ingredient list.
- The missing sugarTwo ounces of unsweetened chocolate, 1/2 cup milk and 1/3 cup corn syrup will not reach the soft-ball stage or set into squares, and would be punishingly bitter if it did. A line has almost certainly dropped out in typesetting; fudges of this type commonly run to somewhere around 2 cups granulated sugar for this quantity of liquid. The original as given cannot be followed literally, and the amount is a genuine guess rather than a conversion.
- Squares of chocolateA "square" is a 1-ounce block of unsweetened baking chocolate, so this is 2 oz. "Bitter chocolate" means unsweetened, not the modern bittersweet bar, which already carries sugar.
- AbbreviationsC is cup, T tablespoon, t teaspoon. Milk means whole milk; the fat matters to the texture.
- KaroCorn syrup. The recipe does not say light or dark; light is the usual choice for a fudge like this. It is doing real work: the glucose interferes with sucrose crystals and is what keeps the finished fudge fine-grained rather than gritty. Do not substitute honey or maple syrup here.
- Soft ball, in numbers234-240F on a candy thermometer. The cold-water test is reliable if you use fresh cold water each time and judge the ball by how it holds its shape between your fingers.
- The hinge: do not stir once it boilsThis is why the recipe says to stir only before boiling. Agitating a hot supersaturated syrup, or scraping crystallized syrup off the pan sides, seeds large crystals and gives you sandy fudge. Wipe the pan sides down with a wet brush instead.
- "Until it wrinkles around the edges"A cooling cue that corresponds roughly to lukewarm, in the region of 110F, to the back of a finger. Beating hot fudge produces coarse grain; beating cold fudge produces a batter that stiffens before it is in the pan.
- Pan and yieldAn 8x4-inch loaf pan or a small 6-inch square pan, buttered. The batch is modest, but with the sugar quantity itself conjectural no reliable weight or square count can be given. Mark the squares while the surface is still soft and cut through when fully set.
Church and society cookbooks of the 1910s-30s are often cited as a vehicle by which corn-syrup candy-making spread in American home cooking. Karo, on the market from the early 1900s, was heavily promoted for exactly this use, and syrup is generally said to have made overcooking and crystallization less punishing than an all-sugar boil. Placing fudge under "Cake Icings and Fillings" rather than with the candies suggests something about how these cooks worked. The same pan of chocolate, poured while still fluid, became a fudge frosting; beaten stiffer and set, it was cut into squares for the sweets table. Attribution by married name -- Mrs. R. M. Dillon -- was a standard credit line in community cookbooks of the period.