Home › Cake Icings and Fillings › Chocolate Fudge (C milk t salt t vanilla T)
Chocolate Fudge (C milk t salt t vanilla T)
3/4 C milk ¼ t salt 1 t vanilla 1 T butter Cook until it forms soft ball in cold water. Then beat and pour into buttered dish to cool.
Mrs. Eleanor Suydam.
A standard boiled fudge in shorthand, of the kind church-supper books printed by the hundred. The sugar and chocolate quantities are not stated in this text, so treat the surviving lines as method rather than a complete formula.
- Missing quantitiesAs printed, only the milk, salt, vanilla and butter are given; the sugar and chocolate that make up the bulk of the candy do not appear. For reference, contemporary fudges of this style ran to roughly 2 cups sugar and 2 ounces unsweetened chocolate for every 3/4 cup milk, but that ratio is not in the original.
- AbbreviationsC is cup, T is tablespoon, t is teaspoon. The salt reading of "14 t" is a broken fraction; a quarter teaspoon is the usual amount in fudge of this size.
- Soft ball, in numbersThe cold-water test corresponds to roughly 234-240F on a candy thermometer. Below that the fudge will be too soft to set; cooked much past that range it tends to set hard and grainy. A thermometer is more reliable than the water test, though dropping a bead into cold water remains a good cross-check.
- When the butter goes inAdd the butter and vanilla after the syrup comes off the heat, not during boiling. Stirring fat and flavouring into the hot syrup while it cooks encourages early crystallisation and drives off the vanilla.
- Cool before beatingThe hinge of the whole recipe. Let the pan stand undisturbed until the mixture drops to about 110F, then beat. Beating while hot gives coarse, gritty sugar crystals; beating cool gives the fine grain that reads as creamy.
- Knowing when to stopBeat until the gloss dulls and the mass thickens and holds a trail, then pour at once. Fudge stiffens in seconds at that point, and a moment's hesitation leaves it unspreadable in the pan.
- Pan and yieldA buttered 8-inch square pan would suit a batch of the size suggested above, which would make roughly a pound of candy, though the original gives no quantities to judge by. Score it into squares while still warm and cut through once fully set.
Fudge is a late nineteenth-century American invention, generally traced to women's colleges in the northeastern states in the 1880s and 1890s, where students made it over gas lamps and passed handwritten formulas between campuses; the name appears to come from the slang sense of fudging or botching, a batch of caramel that failed to reach hard-crack and set soft instead. By the time congregational cookbooks like this one were being compiled, fudge had moved out of the dormitory and into the church kitchen, where it was cheap, needed no oven, and travelled well to bazaars and sales.