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Chocolate Cream Candy
2 cups sugar. 2/3 cup milk. 1 tablespoon butter 2 squares unsweetened chocolate 1 teaspoon vanilla Put butter into granite saucepan; when melted, add sugar and milk. Heat to boiling-point; then add chocolate, and stir constantly until chocolate is melted. Boil thirteen minutes, remove from fire, add vanilla, and beat until creamy and mixture begins to sugar slightly around edge of saucepan. Pour at once into a buttered pan, cool slightly, and mark in squares. Omit vanilla, if desired, and add, while cooking, one-fourth teaspoon cinnamon.
This is fudge under an older name, and the page as printed is missing part of its ingredient list. A candy thermometer resolves nearly everything else.
- The incomplete listOnly butter, chocolate and vanilla are given quantities, yet the method calls for sugar and milk. Comparable cream candies in this book run about 2 cups granulated sugar to 3/4 cup milk for this amount of butter and chocolate, but that is a reconstruction from neighbouring recipes, not what the page says.
- The hinge: when to beatBeating while the syrup is still hot is what produces gritty fudge. Let it stand off the heat until the bottom of the pan is only warm to the hand, around 110F, then beat until it thickens and loses gloss. The "sugars slightly around the edge" cue is the crystallization starting, and once it appears you have seconds, not minutes, to get it into the pan.
- Boil thirteen minutesThat timing assumes a particular pan, burner and volume. What it is aiming at is the soft-ball stage, 236-238F; check with a thermometer rather than the clock. A few degrees high gives a candy that sets hard and crumbly.
- Granite saucepanGraniteware is enamelled steel, valued here because it does not react with the milk or scorch as readily as thin tin. Any heavy-bottomed nonreactive pan works, and heavy matters more than the material since a milk-and-sugar syrup catches easily.
- Squares of chocolateAn unsweetened baking square is one ounce, so this is 2 oz of unsweetened chocolate. Chopping it before it goes in shortens the stirring time; do not substitute semisweet, which will throw the sugar balance out.
- Marking in squaresScore the surface with a buttered knife while the slab is still warm but set, then break along the lines once cold. Cutting cold fudge cracks it.
- YieldWith the proportions above, roughly a pound of candy in an 8-inch square pan, cut into 24 to 36 pieces depending on how you score it.
- The cinnamon variationA quarter teaspoon added during cooking rather than at the end, which lets it bloom in the hot syrup. The page's wording ('Omit vanilla, if desired') leaves it to the cook whether the cinnamon replaces the vanilla or joins it.
Fudge belongs to the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and its spread through American kitchens is generally traced to the women's colleges of the 1880s and 1890s, where students made it over gas jets and spirit lamps in their rooms and traded recipes under names like Vassar and Smith fudge. Fannie Farmer's book, first published in 1896, prints this one under the older heading "cream candy" -- the point being the crystalline, opaque texture achieved by beating a boiled sugar syrup, as distinct from the clear brittles and pulled candies in the same chapter. Whether the college fudges were deliberately gathered under that name is not something this page shows. That the recipe gives a boiling time rather than a temperature fits a moment when candy thermometers existed but were not yet assumed to be in every kitchen.