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Six-Minute Fudge
Hannah Meyer. 2 C powdered sugar 1/2 C milk 2 squares chocolate (melted) Butter Vanilla Marshmallow creme Stir all together and place on fire to cook about six minutes. Remove from fire and add 1½ T marshmallow creme, add nuts, beat well, and turn into buttered pan. Mark into squares and serve. Blanche Triggs.
A quick boiled fudge with almost no quantities given for the butter, vanilla or marshmallow creme beyond the tablespoon and a half added at the end. Treat the six minutes as a guide and the thermometer as the authority.
- The hinge: 236-238FCook until a candy thermometer reads 236-238F, the soft-ball stage, which may take rather more or less than the six minutes given depending on your pan and burner; under-cooked fudge will not set and over-cooked fudge turns grainy and hard.
- "Powdered sugar"In books of this period the term often means finely granulated sugar rather than modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch. Ordinary granulated sugar is the safer reading for a boiled fudge; 2 cups is about 14 oz.
- Squares of chocolateA square is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate. Two squares against two cups of sugar gives a mild, sweet fudge.
- Unmeasured butter and vanillaThe original lists both without amounts. About 2 tablespoons butter and 1 teaspoon vanilla suit this volume. Add the vanilla off the heat, after the boiling stops, so it does not cook away.
- Marshmallow cremeThe 1½ tablespoons called for is a small amount and acts as an interfering agent, keeping the sugar crystals fine. Stir it in while the mixture is still hot enough to melt it smoothly.
- Beat well, then move fastBeat until the gloss dulls and the mass thickens, then pour at once. Fudge sets quickly at this stage and will seize in the pan if you keep working it.
- Pan and yieldAn 8-inch square pan, buttered, gives fudge about half an inch thick and roughly 25 pieces. Score the squares while it is still warm and cut through when fully cool.
Boiled fudge spread through American home cooking in the last years of the nineteenth century, associated in particular with women's colleges, where it could be made over a chafing dish or gas ring in a dormitory room. The "six-minute" and "five-minute" fudges that fill church and club cookbooks of the 1910s through 1940s may well represent a later, quicker generation of the recipe: marshmallow creme, sold commercially from the 1910s onward, supplied the smooth texture that older recipes achieved only through long, careful beating. The double attribution, Hannah Meyer at the head and Blanche Triggs at the foot, is the sort of thing often seen in community cookbooks assembled from handwritten cards, though how it arose here cannot be established.