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Chocolate Fudge
2 cups sugar 1 or 2 squares chocolate 1/8 teaspoon cream of tartar or 2 tablespoons corn sirup or glucose 2/3 cup milk 1 teaspoon vanilla 1 tablespoon butter Mix the sugar, milk, grated chocolate, cream of tartar or corn sirup and boil rather slowly, stirring until the ingredients are well blended. Boil to the soft-ball stage, or 236 degrees F. Remove from the stove, add the butter, but do not stir it in. When lukewarm, add the vanilla and beat until it creams; that is, until the shiny appearance disappears and the fudge holds its shape. Spread it in a buttered pan and when it hardens mark it into squares.
A standard beaten fudge, the kind that stands or falls on two things: an accurate 236°F and leaving the pan strictly alone while it cools. Everything else is negotiable.
- Squares of chocolateA square means a 1-ounce block of unsweetened baking chocolate. Two squares gives a properly dark fudge; one gives something closer to a pale chocolate cream. Chopping is easier than grating and melts just as evenly in the hot syrup.
- Cream of tartar or corn syrup, not bothBoth are doing the same job — interfering with sugar crystals so the finished fudge sets fine-grained rather than gritty. Cream of tartar inverts some of the sucrose as it boils; corn syrup adds glucose directly. Use one or the other, as written.
- 236°F means 236°FUse a clip-on candy thermometer and check it in boiling water first. Subtract about 1°F for every 500 feet above sea level, so at 3,000 feet pull the pan at roughly 230°F. A few degrees over and the fudge is dry and crumbly; under, and it never sets.
- Sirup and glucoseCorn sirup is plain light corn syrup. Glucose here means confectioner's glucose syrup, sold for candy work; light corn syrup substitutes for it directly.
- Stop stirring once it boilsStirring, then leaving it alone -- The recipe has you stir as it boils, but only until the ingredients are well blended. After that it is best left: a stray sugar crystal dragged in from the pan wall will seed the whole batch coarse. Wash the sides down with a wet pastry brush if you see crystals forming.
- Butter on top, undisturbedDropping the butter in without stirring is deliberate. Any agitation of hot syrup starts crystallization early. The butter simply sits and melts while the pan cools.
- Lukewarm is about 110°FCool the pan on a rack without moving or scraping it until the bottom is merely warm to the palm. Beating fudge while it is still hot is a common cause of a grainy batch; beating it cold makes it seize before it can be spread.
- Beating and panBeat with a wooden spoon until the gloss dulls and the mass thickens — usually five to ten minutes by hand. Spread at once in a buttered pan; the recipe does not give a size, but this quantity is roughly a pound and suits an 8-inch square.
Fudge is one of the few confections with a plausibly American origin story, and it is generally traced to the women's colleges of the northeastern United States in the late 1880s and 1890s — Vassar, Smith and Wellesley students are all credited with early batches, and the account has recipes circulating in students' letters before they reached print, though the picturesque details of gas jets and dormitory rooms belong to the retelling rather than to any firm record. The name is usually explained as a slang term for a botch or a fudged job, the candy supposedly being a happy accident of a mismanaged caramel; that account is traditional rather than documented. What can be said of this recipe is that it gives both the old soft-ball test and a precise figure, 236°F, side by side — the habit of printing both that cookbooks adopted as candy thermometers became more widely available.