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Divinity Fudge
3 egg whites Vanilla Boil sugar, syrup and water until it spins a thread. Then add to well beaten egg whites, pouring slowly. Nuts may be added. Turn into buttered dish and mark in squares.
Blanche Triggs.
The ingredient list has come down to us incomplete — only the egg whites and vanilla are named, though the method calls for sugar, syrup and water. What follows fills in what the period assumed and what modern candy practice has settled.
- The missing quantitiesThe original gives no amounts for the sugar, syrup or water, so this cannot be followed literally. A commonly used working ratio for three whites is about 2 cups sugar, 1/2 cup corn syrup and 1/2 cup water; treat that as a reconstruction, not as what Blanche Triggs wrote.
- "Syrup" means corn syrup"Syrup" most likely means corn syrup -- In an early twentieth-century American community cookbook an unqualified "syrup" in candy work is most often light corn syrup rather than maple or cane. Whatever the source, it acts as an interfering agent to keep the sugar from crystallising, which is a large part of why divinity stays smooth.
- Thread stage is too softA syrup that "spins a thread" is about 230-235F. Modern divinity is cooked to firm or hard ball, 250-260F, because thread-stage syrup will not carry enough dissolved sugar to set the beaten whites into a candy that holds a square. Use a thermometer rather than the thread test.
- Pour into moving whitesThe hinge of the recipe. Beat the whites to stiff peaks first, then add the hot syrup in a thin steady stream against the side of the bowl while the beater runs. Dumping it in cooks the whites into threads and the candy will never whip up.
- Egg whites and heatEven a hot syrup does not hold the whites at a pasteurising temperature for any length of time. If you are serving anyone pregnant, elderly or immune-compromised, use pasteurized egg whites.
- Beat until it dullsAfter the syrup is in, keep beating — five to ten minutes with a stand mixer — until the gloss goes flat and a dropped spoonful holds its shape. Stir the vanilla and nuts in at that point and work fast, as it stiffens within a minute or two.
- Weather mattersDivinity fails on a humid day; the candy absorbs moisture and stays sticky. Make it when the air is dry, and cook the syrup a few degrees higher if it is not.
- Dish and yieldThe recipe says only a buttered dish; an 8-inch square pan suits the reconstructed quantities above. Score the squares while the surface is still soft, as fully set divinity cuts badly. Yield depends entirely on the amounts used.
Divinity belongs to the family of boiled-syrup egg-white confections — sea foam, nougat, boiled icing — that spread rapidly through American home kitchens after commercial corn syrup became cheap and widely sold in the first years of the twentieth century; the sugar-plus-glucose combination is what makes the candy reliably smooth rather than grainy. Its appearance among the icings rather than among the sweets is not a filing error: the same mixture, stopped at a softer stage and spread instead of poured, is the boiled or seven-minute style icing of the period, and cooks moved between the two by cooking the syrup a little longer or a little less. The name is generally taken to be simple superlative, the candy being called divine; no documented origin for the term survives. The attribution to Blanche Triggs is typical of a community cookbook, where recipes were collected under the names of the women who contributed them and circulated as much for the signature as for the sweet.