Fudge
1 cups granulated sugar 1/2 cup milk 2 ounces unsweetened chocolate Butter size of egg 1 teaspoon vanilla Boil the mixture until it will make a soft ball when dropped in water. Remove from the fire; beat until thick, adding the vanilla while beating. Pour into buttered pans; mark in squares and set aside to cool.
A plain 19th-century chocolate fudge with no thermometer and no cooling step written in — both of which decide whether you get fudge or chocolate syrup.
- The sugar quantity is garbled"1 cups granulated sugar" reads like a typesetting error with a digit dropped; comparable period fudges pair a half cup of milk and 2 ounces of chocolate with more sugar than this, and at one cup the batch may not set firmly.
- Butter size of eggAbout 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Old books routinely measured butter by bulk against a hen's egg rather than by weight.
- Soft ball, in numbers234–240°F on a candy thermometer. The cold-water test the recipe describes is reliable enough, but drop into ice water and judge the ball between your fingers, not in the cup.
- The step that is missingDo not beat while it is still hot. Let the syrup stand undisturbed off the heat until it drops to roughly 110F, then beat. Beating hot produces large sugar crystals and a grainy, sandy fudge -- a common cause of failure with recipes written like this one.
- Add the vanilla lateStirring it in during the cooling and beating, as written, is correct — vanilla's aroma boils off fast in a 240°F syrup.
- Unsweetened chocolateStill sold, and still what this needs. Chop modern bars small so they melt into the milk without scorching on the pan bottom.
- Pan and yieldA small buttered loaf pan gives a good depth from this quantity. Score the surface while it is still warm and cut through once fully cold.
- Watch the milkHalf a cup of milk over a strong flame will catch. Use a heavy saucepan and moderate heat, and stir only until the sugar dissolves; after that, leave it alone so crystals do not seed on the spoon.
Fudge belongs to the American 1890s and 1900s rather than to any older confectionery tradition -- it is generally traced to women's colleges in the northeastern United States, where students are said to have made it over gas lamps and chafing dishes in their rooms, and recipes circulated under the names of Vassar, Smith and Wellesley. It is essentially a fondant: a boiled sugar syrup deliberately crystallized by beating, which is why the beating instruction, not the boiling, is the heart of the method.