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Fudge Nut Frosting
Add one cup shredded nuts to Fudge Frosting, just before removing from fire.
A one-line variation that depends entirely on the Fudge Frosting recipe it points back to. The whole trick is timing: the nuts go in at the end of cooking, not into the beaten frosting.
- "Just before removing from fire"Stir the nuts in during the last few seconds on the heat, then pull the pan. Adding them later, once the frosting has been beaten to spreading consistency, forces you to work it further and the sugar grains out.
- The base frostingPeriod fudge frostings of this type are generally chocolate, sugar, milk or cream and butter boiled to the soft-ball stage (roughly 236-240F on a thermometer), then cooled and beaten until the gloss goes. This variation gives no quantities or method of its own, so follow whatever the book's Fudge Frosting entry says; this note adds nothing but the nuts.
- "Shredded nuts"In cookbooks of this period "shredded" generally indicated nuts cut or slivered thin rather than ground. Coarsely chopped or slivered walnuts, pecans or almonds will serve; the recipe does not specify a variety. A food processor turns them to oily paste, which will slacken the frosting.
- Toast them firstToast them first (optional; the recipe says nothing either way about the state of the nuts) -- about ten minutes in a moderate oven, cooled completely, gives markedly better flavour and keeps them from going soft in the frosting.
- Working windowFudge frosting sets fast once it begins to thicken, and a cup of nuts makes it stiffen faster still. Have the cake cooled and on its plate before you start beating, and spread the moment it holds a swirl.
- If it sets too hardStand the pan in hot water for a minute and stir; a teaspoon of hot cream or milk will also loosen it. Do not return it to direct heat.
- YieldDepends entirely on the quantities in the book's Fudge Frosting recipe, which this entry does not restate; the cup of nuts bulks it out somewhat.
Lowney's Cook Book was written by Maria Willett Howard and published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer, in 1907 -- one of the many turn-of-the-century cookbooks issued by a food firm to put its product into American kitchens, in the same tradition as the Baker's and Rumford books. That explains why the dessert chapter runs so heavily to chocolate, and why a frosting gets a second entry just for the addition of a cup of nuts. Fudge itself was still fairly new: its origins are usually traced to American women's colleges in the late 1880s and 1890s, with an often-repeated account attaching it to Vassar, though the familiar details of students cooking it in their rooms belong to that lore rather than to firm record. By the 1900s the boiled, beaten, soft-ball-stage confection was appearing as a cake frosting as well as a candy, and nut-studded versions were common in American dessert chapters of the period.