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Nut Caramel Fudge
Three cups light brown sugar, 1 tablespoon butter, 1 cup milk, 1 or 1½ cups nuts; flavor with vanilla. Cook sugar, butter and milk until it will thread. Take from fire, add flavoring, nuts, and beat as you would fudge. Pour into buttered pan, cool and cut.
A brown-sugar fudge of the kind that lives or dies by two things: the temperature you pull it off the heat and when you start beating. The ingredient list is short enough that everything depends on technique.
- "Until it will thread"Thread stage is usually given as somewhere around 223-235F, the low end for a fudge that will cut cleanly. Cooking on to about 236-238F (soft-ball) on a candy thermometer gives a firm slice; stopping at 232F gives something closer to a thick spread. Without a thermometer, the soft-ball test is a syrup that forms a ball in cold water which flattens between your fingers.
- Beat at the right momentThis is the hinge. Cool the syrup undisturbed to about 110F before beating, then beat until it loses its gloss and thickens. Beating hot syrup gives coarse, grainy sugar crystals; beating cold, stiff syrup gives fudge that seizes in the pot before it reaches the pan.
- Light brown sugarThree cups is about 1 lb 6 oz packed. Modern light brown sugar is generally refined white sugar with molasses added back, so it behaves consistently; older "light brown" was often a less refined sugar. Pack it firmly when measuring.
- Milk, and scorchingWhole milk, and a heavy-bottomed pan. Milk sugars and proteins catch easily as the mixture boils down, so stir until the sugar dissolves, then leave it alone and keep the heat moderate rather than high.
- Butter and vanilla go in off the heatVanilla goes in off the heat -- The butter is cooked with the sugar and milk, as the recipe directs; one tablespoon is a small amount by modern fudge standards and acts mainly to discourage crystallizing. The vanilla is added after the pan comes off the fire; added earlier, some of the flavor boils away.
- The nutsWalnuts or pecans, chopped, and worth toasting first at 350F for 8 minutes. The recipe adds them along with the flavoring, before the beating begins.
- Pan and yieldAn 8-inch square pan gives a fudge about three quarters of an inch thick and roughly 36 pieces. Butter the pan while the syrup is still cooking, and score the surface before it sets hard.
- HumiditySugar work at thread and soft-ball stage is sensitive to damp air. On a humid day cook one or two degrees higher, and expect a softer set regardless.
Fudge in the American sense appears in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and spread quickly through women's colleges in the 1880s and 1890s, where it could be made over a chafing dish or gas ring in a dormitory room; the brown-sugar version, often sold under the name penuche or penoche, is sometimes said to be the older and plainer branch of the family, though the evidence for its priority over chocolate fudge is not firm. The word "caramel" here does not mean burnt sugar but the flavor brown sugar and milk develop when boiled together, and the recipe's assumption that a reader already knows how to "beat as you would fudge" says a good deal about how familiar the technique had become by the time collections like this one were printed for household use.