Penoche
3 cups brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup milk
1 cup nut-meats
1 tablespoon butter
Put the sugar and milk into a saucepan and cook to the soft-ball stage, or 236° F. Remove from the fire, add butter and vanilla, and cool without stirring. When it is lukewarm, beat until it is creamy. Stir in the broken nut-meats. Hickory nuts or English walnuts are especially nice. Pour into a buttered pan and when it hardens mark into squares.
A brown-sugar fudge that follows classic candy method: cook, cool undisturbed, then beat. The recipe gives a thermometer reading, which was still a novelty in 1900s household books, so the main work is in the handling rather than guesswork.
- The hinge: cool before beatingDo not stir, scrape or jostle the syrup while it cools from 236F down to about 110F. Agitating hot syrup throws large sugar crystals and the finished penoche will be grainy instead of creamy.
- The temperature236F is the soft-ball stage at sea level. Subtract roughly 1F for every 500 feet of elevation, and calibrate the thermometer in boiling water first, since a few degrees either way is the difference between a soft sludge and a hard brick.
- Pan and boil-overSugar and milk together climb, so use a heavy saucepan at least three times the volume of the mixture. Heavy-bottomed matters here: brown sugar and milk solids scorch quickly on thin metal.
- MilkWhole milk. Skim and low-fat milk were not the ordinary household choice when this was written, and the fat contributes to the soft texture. Evaporated milk, which some later versions use, tends to give a denser candy.
- Brown sugarPeriod brown sugar was less uniform than today's. Light brown gives the traditional pale caramel color; dark brown makes a stronger, more molasses-forward candy. Pack it when measuring.
- BeatingBeat with a wooden spoon until the gloss dulls and the mass thickens and lightens, typically several minutes. Stop and pour the moment it stiffens, or it will set in the pan.
- NutsHickory nuts were a common gathered nut in American households and are hard to buy now; pecans are the closest substitute. Toasting the nuts first is not in the original but improves them.
- Yield and panClose to two pounds of candy. An 8-inch square pan gives squares about three-quarters of an inch thick; mark while still warm and cut through once fully set.
Penoche is one of many American spellings of panocha or penuche, generally traced to the Spanish word for raw or unrefined sugar, the same sort of sugar sold in Mexico as piloncillo cones of dark cane sugar. In American cookbooks the name attached itself to a brown-sugar fudge made without chocolate, and it turns up steadily in domestic manuals from around the turn of the century, an era when home candy-making flourished and recipes could be found in household volumes far from the confectioner's shop.