Maple Fudge
2½ cups maple sugar
½ cup boiling water
1 cup milk
1 cup broken nut-meats
Break the maple sugar into small pieces and heat it in a saucepan with the water. When it is dissolved, add the milk. Boil to the soft-ball stage, or 236° F. Remove from the fire and cool. When it is lukewarm, beat until it creams and add the nut-meats. Spread it in a buttered pan and when it hardens mark it into squares.
A two-stage sugar recipe: cook to a precise temperature, then cool undisturbed before beating. Nearly every failure with fudge comes from getting the second stage wrong.
- The hinge: cool before beatingThe syrup must fall to about 110°F — lukewarm to a fingertip on the outside of the pan — before you stir it at all. Beating hot syrup grows large crystals and gives grainy fudge; beating at lukewarm gives the fine grain that reads as creamy.
- Do not stir while it boilsOnce the sugar is dissolved, leave the spoon out. Wash any crystals from the sides of the pan with a wet pastry brush, and cover the pan for the first minute or two so the steam does the same job.
- 236°F is not negotiable236°F, and close to it — Use a calibrated candy thermometer. Boil to 234-236°F at sea level, and subtract roughly 1°F for every 500 feet of elevation; a couple of degrees over tends to give crumbly fudge, a couple under a soft mass that never sets.
- Maple sugarSold as hard cakes or blocks around 1900, and still available as blocks or granules from maple producers. Granulated maple sugar dissolves faster and can be measured straight; 2½ cups is roughly a pound, though the weight varies a good deal with the grind. Maple syrup is not a substitute here without recalculating the liquid.
- The milkWhole milk. The recipe scorches easily once the milk goes in, so drop the heat and use a heavy pan — a thin one will catch the milk solids and give the fudge a burnt edge.
- Nut-meatsButternuts and hickory nuts were common New England choices; walnuts or pecans are the usual modern reading. Toast them first and add them at the very end of beating, when the mass has just lost its gloss.
- Pan and yieldA buttered 8-inch square pan gives a slab a little over half an inch thick, about 1¼ lb, or 36 pieces. Score the squares while it is still warm and cut through once fully set.
Fudge as a named sweet belongs to the American 1890s: it spread through women's colleges -- Vassar, Smith and Wellesley are all traditionally credited with early versions -- as a confection students could make over a chafing dish or gas jet in a dormitory room, and printed recipes multiplied from there. Maple fudge is a New England and Great Lakes variant, made in regions where maple sugar was locally produced and where the sugar cakes pressed at spring sugaring-off kept in the pantry.