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Coffee Fudge
2 cups granulated sugar 1 cup strong coffee 1 tablespoon butter or 1 tablespoon rich cream speck of salt Boil together until it forms a thread. Remove from fire and beat until smooth and creamy. Pour into buttered pan and mark into squares when partly cool.
A three-ingredient coffee-flavoured fondant, closer to old-fashioned penuche than to the chocolate fudge most people picture. Everything depends on the temperature you take the syrup to and, just as much, on how long you let it cool before beating.
- The thread test is too vague hereThe thread test is vague here: period books put "forms a thread" at roughly 230-235F, and at the low end this may never set. Cook to about 236-238F on a thermometer, or to soft-ball stage in cold water.
- Cool before beatingThis departs from the recipe, which has you beat as soon as it comes off the fire, but it is what decides whether the fudge is smooth or gritty. Take the pan off the heat, do not stir or scrape, and leave it undisturbed until it drops to about 110F, then beat until it thickens and loses its gloss. Beating a hot syrup forces large sugar crystals.
- Coffee strengthThe recipe does not say how strong, but "strong coffee" presumably means a brew stouter than a modern drip cup. Use double-strength brewed coffee, or add a teaspoon of instant to a cup of regular, or the sugar may flatten the flavour.
- Butter or cream, not bothThe recipe offers a choice. Butter is likely to give a firmer, plainer candy and the tablespoon of rich cream a softer set. Note that the recipe has everything boiled together rather than the fat added off the heat.
- Keep the pan sides cleanWash down any sugar crystals clinging above the syrup with a wet pastry brush during the boil, and cover the pan for the first two minutes so steam does the work. One stray crystal will seed the whole batch.
- Pan and yieldTwo cups of sugar fills a buttered 6-inch square pan and gives about 25 small squares. A larger pan gives a sheet too thin to cut cleanly.
- Marking and cuttingScore the squares while the surface is still slightly warm and pliable, as directed, then cut through once fully set. Fudge scored cold will crack along the lines instead of parting.
Coffee as a candy flavouring sits alongside coffee ice cream and coffee jelly among the ways American cooks came to treat coffee as a flavouring rather than only a drink. The technique underneath is much older: boil sugar with a liquid to soft-ball, cool it, and beat it into a fondant, which is the same method behind penuche, maple fudge and the sea-foam and divinity of the same books. Boiled sugar candies were long made for the holidays, when they were cheap to produce in quantity, kept well in tins, and served equally as an after-dinner sweet and as a gift.