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Potato Fudge
Boil good sized potato and mash. Add 2 tsp. butter, 1 lb. confectioner's sugar, package of cocoanut, 1 tsp. vanilla, and cool. Then melt one square of chocolate, 1 tbsp. butter and spread over.
— A Contributor
An uncooked confection that works by osmosis: sugar draws water out of the mashed potato, and the resulting syrup binds a pound of icing sugar into a stiff, marzipan-like paste. The proportions in the original are elastic, so work by feel.
- Start with the potato, not the sugarThe original calls for a "good sized" potato; boiled and mashed plain — no milk, no salt, no seasoning — a medium one gives roughly 1/2 cup of mash, probably more than a pound of sugar will take up. Add the sugar a little at a time and stop when the mixture holds together as a firm dough; you may not need the whole pound, or you may need more.
- Why it goes to liquidIcing sugar hitting warm mash turns the whole thing to soup for a minute or two before it thickens. This is normal and is the reason the recipe cannot be scaled by adding all the sugar at once. If it stays loose, keep adding sugar.
- "Package of cocoanut"In this period this most likely means a small carton of shredded coconut, on the order of 4 oz or a heaped cup. Unsweetened dried shredded coconut is probably closer to what the contributor bought than modern sweetened flake, which will make the candy noticeably sweeter and slightly wetter.
- One square of chocolateA baking square is 1 oz of unsweetened chocolate. Melted with a tablespoon of butter it makes a thin, bitter glaze against a very sweet base — deliberate. Semi-sweet chips, 1 to 1 1/2 oz, are a reasonable substitute if unsweetened tastes too stark.
- Cool before glazing"And cool" — press the coconut mixture into a buttered pan (an 8-inch square works) and chill it firm, 30 to 60 minutes, before pouring the chocolate over. Warm fudge will absorb the glaze rather than hold it as a layer.
- CuttingScore the chocolate while it is still soft; once set hard it shatters and drags. Cut into 1-inch squares — about 64 from an 8-inch pan.
- KeepingThere is real potato in this, so it is not a shelf-stable candy. Keep it covered in the refrigerator and eat within about a week.
Potato candy belongs to a family of no-cook confections that turn up repeatedly in American church and club cookbooks of the early twentieth century, often in a peanut butter version rolled into a pinwheel and occasionally, as here, bound with coconut and finished with chocolate. Its appeal was practical: it needed no thermometer, no long boiling, and no expensive ingredient beyond a pound of confectioner's sugar, which by the 1900s was cheap and, by most accounts, readily available. The potato contributes nothing but moisture and a little body — it is a binder, not a flavour. Philathea cook books were compiled by Philathea classes, adult Bible-study groups for young women that spread through Protestant Sunday schools from the 1890s onward and raised funds by collecting members' recipes; the unnamed "A Contributor" attribution is characteristic of the genre, where the point was the class, not the cook.