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Chocolate Fudge
Two cups white granulated sugar, 1 tablespoon butter, 1 cup cream, ¼ cake unsweetened chocolate. Put in the sugar and cream, and when this becomes hot put in the chocolate, broken up into fine pieces. Stir vigorously and constantly. Put in butter when it begins to boil. Stir until it creams when beaten on a saucer or forms soft ball in cold water. Then remove and beat until quite cool and pour into buttered tins. Chopped walnuts, almonds or pecans can be added before stirring.
A short, old-style fudge with no thermometer, no vanilla and no corn syrup — the texture depends entirely on cooking to the right stage and then beating it at the right moment.
- The hinge: beat it cool, not hotFudge sets smooth because thousands of tiny sugar crystals form during beating. Let the syrup drop to about 110F before you start working it, and beat until it loses gloss and stiffens. Beat while it is still near boiling and you get a coarse, grainy slab.
- "¼ cake" of chocolateBaking chocolate came in half-pound cakes scored into ounce squares, so a quarter cake is most likely 2 oz; some brands sold smaller cakes, so the intent may be as little as 1 oz. Two ounces of unsweetened chocolate suits 2 cups sugar. Modern unsweetened baking chocolate is the direct descendant of this product.
- Soft ball, in numbers236–240F on a candy thermometer. The saucer test in the original works: a spoonful dropped on a cold plate should hold a soft, malleable mass rather than a thread or a puddle.
- CreamUse heavy cream, 36% fat. Period "cream" from a dairy was rich and unhomogenised; light cream or half-and-half will produce a softer, stickier set.
- Pan and stirringA heavy 2- to 3-quart saucepan, well above the level of the syrup, since cream-and-sugar mixtures climb. The recipe calls for vigorous, constant stirring throughout, including after the boil; stirring only enough to keep the bottom from scorching once it boils is the modern alternative.
- Nuts"Before stirring" most likely means before the final beating rather than before boiling. Add chopped nuts, about ½ cup, once the mixture has cooled to lukewarm.
- Yield and tinsSomething over a pound of fudge. A buttered 8x4-inch loaf pan gives a thick slab; an 8-inch square pan gives a thinner one. Score into squares while still warm.
- WeatherBoiled sugar candies pick up moisture from the air. On a humid day the fudge will take longer to firm and may stay tacky.
Fudge as Americans know it is generally traced to women's colleges in the northeastern United States in the 1880s and 1890s — Vassar, Smith and Wellesley all had fudge recipes circulating under their names — where a chafing dish in a dormitory room could produce candy without a kitchen. Its rise depended on cheap granulated beet and cane sugar and on the availability of packaged unsweetened baking chocolate, which by the 1890s was a standard grocery item sold in scored cakes. Recipes like this one, printed in community and "reliable recipe" compilations around the turn of the century, are notably bare: no vanilla, no corn syrup, no thermometer, and the cook expected to judge the soft-ball stage on a saucer. Corn syrup and evaporated milk, which make fudge far more forgiving, only became usual in later versions.