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Fudge Filling
2 cups sugar 2 cups rich milk 4 squares chocolate 4 tablespoons butter 1 teaspoon vanilla Mix all ingredients and let stand on back of range until mixture liquefies. Boil until a soft ball is formed. Beat until creamy. Spread between cakes.
This is fudge in every respect except that it is spread rather than cut. The whole recipe turns on two temperatures: the one you boil to, and the one you beat at.
- Squares of chocolateA square is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so four squares is 4 oz. Lowney's sold its own unsweetened baking chocolate; any modern unsweetened bar works, but do not substitute semisweet without cutting the sugar.
- Rich milkWhole milk with some cream in it, or in practice half milk and half light cream. Skim milk gives a thin, grainy filling because there is not enough fat to keep the sugar crystals small.
- Back of the rangeThe cool end of a coal stove, used for gentle melting. On a modern hob this is low heat: stir until the chocolate is melted and the sugar entirely dissolved before the mixture ever comes to a boil. Undissolved grains on the pan wall are the usual cause of gritty fudge.
- Soft ball236-238F on a candy thermometer. With two cups of milk to boil off this will take longer than a cream-based fudge, and how much longer depends on the pan and the heat; stir often near the end, as the mixture scorches readily.
- The hinge: cool before beatingThe recipe says beat until creamy but not when. Take the pan off the heat and leave it undisturbed until it has cooled to about 110F, when the base of the pan is only just warm to the hand. Beating a hot syrup gives coarse crystals and a sandy filling.
- Spreading windowOnce it thickens and loses its gloss it will set within a minute or two. Have the cake layers ready and work fast. If it stiffens too far, beat in a spoonful of hot cream to loosen it.
- YieldEnough to fill and roughly top a two- or three-layer 8- or 9-inch cake. It also keeps as candy: any excess poured into a buttered tin and scored sets into ordinary fudge.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and belongs to the large family of American cookbooks issued by food firms to promote a branded ingredient. That accounts for the sheer quantity of chocolate recipes in it, and for the instruction to count chocolate in squares, the form in which Lowney's sold it. Fudge itself was still a comparatively young sweet in 1907, with the earliest documented references running to the mid-to-late 1880s, and by the received account it is traced to women's colleges in the northeastern United States, where it is said to have spread by handwritten recipe before printed cookbooks caught up; using it as a cake filling rather than cutting it into squares may well have been an easy extension once the boiled-sugar method was widely understood in home kitchens.