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Chocolate Fudge
2 cups sugar
⅔ cup milk
I or 2 squares chocolate
1 teaspoon vanilla
⅛ teaspoon cream of tartar or
1 tablespoon butter
2 tablespoons corn sirup or glucose
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° 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 textbook fudge with the mechanics laid out honestly: cook to 236°F, cool undisturbed, then beat. The instructions hold up, but a few of the terms and the yield need translating.
- "Squares" of chocolateA square is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, still sold in scored bars. One square gives a pale, milky fudge; two is closer to what most people now expect.
- Corn sirup or cream of tartarThese are interfering agents, not flavourings. Cream of tartar is an acid that inverts a little of the sucrose to glucose and fructose during boiling; corn sirup supplies glucose and other sugars ready-made. Either keeps the crystals small and the texture smooth. Use one or the other, not both.
- The temperature is the recipe236 tF is the point the whole thing turns on. A few degrees low and the fudge is likely to stay soft; a few high and it tends towards hard and crumbly. Use a calibrated candy thermometer and read it with the bulb submerged but off the pan bottom.
- Do not stir in the butterThe point of leaving it on the surface is that the syrup must not be disturbed. Any agitation of hot syrup starts large crystals, which is exactly the grainy fudge this step avoids.
- "Lukewarm" means about 110°FBeating too hot gives coarse grain; beating after it has gone cold and stiff means it will seize before you can spread it. Around 110°F, or just barely warm to the back of the hand, is the window.
- Boil "rather slowly"Use a heavy saucepan at least three times the volume of the mixture. Milk and sugar scorch readily, and the syrup climbs when it comes to the boil.
- Pan and yieldThis makes roughly a pound of fudge. An 8-inch square pan spreads it thin; a buttered 8x4-inch loaf pan or a small 6-inch square gives a deeper slab for cutting.
Fudge belongs to the late nineteenth-century American vogue for home candy-making, and is generally traced to women's colleges in the northeastern United States in the 1880s and 1890s, where it was traded by recipe. What sets it apart from older boiled sugar confections is deliberate crystallisation: instead of the clear, glassy pull of taffy, fudge depends on stopping the syrup at a precise point and then forcing thousands of tiny crystals by beating. That precision is why the recipe appears here with a number attached. By the time it was collected, cookbooks had begun replacing older tests such as the cold-water soft-ball trial with degrees Fahrenheit, keeping the old name alongside the new figure as this recipe does.