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Fudge
2 T butter 1/2 C milk 1 t vanilla Thoroughly mix all ingredients in saucepan, bring to boiling point. Boil without stirring, if possible, until candy forms soft ball in cold water (240°F). Cool. Beat, adding vanilla, until creamy. Spread in shallow pan and mark in squares.
Edna F. Doerschuk. 3 C white sugar 3 T cocoa 2 T maple syrup
The typesetting here has scrambled the order: the ingredient list runs both before and after the method, and the vanilla is listed once but called for twice. Read it as one ingredient list — 3 cups white sugar, 3 tablespoons cocoa, 2 tablespoons maple syrup, 2 tablespoons butter, 1/2 cup milk, 1 teaspoon vanilla — with the vanilla held back until the beating stage.
- The liquid is on the low sideThree cups of sugar to half a cup of milk is a dry ratio by modern standards; many fudge recipes of this type call for more milk in proportion to the sugar. Whether the original called for more milk or simply relied on a heavy pan and low heat cannot be recovered from the page, but expect it to thicken and reach temperature fast, and watch for scorching before the sugar has dissolved.
- Soft ball, and what the number means240F sits at the top of the soft-ball range as some sources define it (roughly 235-245F overall). A calibrated candy thermometer is more reliable than the cold-water test, but do both: check the thermometer in boiling water first and adjust for your altitude, subtracting about 1F per 500 feet.
- Do not stir once it boilsThis is the hinge. Stirring a boiling sugar syrup seeds large crystals and gives grainy fudge. Stir only until the sugar dissolves, then leave it alone, and wash any crystals off the pan sides with a wet brush.
- Cool before beatingThe page does not say how far; fudge of this type is conventionally cooled to around 110F, warm to the hand but no longer hot. Beating too soon gives a coarse grain; beating too late and it sets in the pan before you can spread it.
- Add the vanilla at the beating stageVanilla added at the start of a long boil loses most of its aroma. Hold it back and beat it in as the mass turns from glossy to matte.
- Pan and yieldThe page gives neither pan size nor yield; "shallow pan" is all it says, and a buttered square pan suits the quantity. Three cups of sugar plus the other ingredients makes a good deal more than a pound of fudge, cut into as many squares as the pan allows. Mark the squares while the surface is still soft and cut through once it has firmed.
- Why it sits among the icingsWhy it may sit among the icings -- If the book places it with the icings, that reflects how close boiled fudge is to a boiled frosting; the recipe itself, however, directs only that it be spread in a shallow pan and marked in squares.
Fudge belongs to the American sugar-boiling tradition that flourished once cheap refined beet and cane sugar, tinned cocoa and canned condensed milk reached the ordinary household at the end of the nineteenth century; it is generally traced to women's colleges in the 1880s and 1890s, where students made it over whatever heat came to hand, and the recipe spread through handwritten copies before it reached print. Church and club cookbooks like this one, sold to raise money and filled with named contributions, are exactly the vehicle by which such recipes were fixed in type — Edna F. Doerschuk's version is a neighbor's working formula, not an editor's, which is why it arrives without a yield, without a pan size, and with its ingredient list broken in half by the compositor. Its apparent placement under "Cake Icings and Fillings" would be a reminder that the line between candy and frosting was thinner then: the same boiled sugar, beaten to the same soft crystal, served either purpose depending on whether you poured it over a cake or scored it into squares.