Maple Fudge
One pound maple sugar and one cup milk.
Bring to a boil and add a tablespoon of butter. Cook until it becomes brittle when tested in cold water. Remove from the fire, stir vigorously until it begins to granulate around the edge of the kettle and then pour into a buttered pan.
PENUCHIE-Three cups of brown sugar and one cup of milk. Boil until it forms a soft ball when tested in cold water. Add a tea spoon of butter, flavor with a teaspoon of vanilla and stir in a. cup of broken nut meats, either hickory, or English walnuts. Pour into buttered pan and mark in squares with a buttered. knife.
Two candies in one entry, both worked by the cold-water test rather than a thermometer. A candy thermometer removes nearly all the guesswork, but the temperatures below matter more than the times, which the original does not give.
- "Brittle" is probably a misprint for the fudge you wantCooked until a dropped bead turns brittle in cold water, sugar is at the hard-crack stage, roughly 300F, and the result will set as a hard, crumbly maple cake rather than fudge. For a sliceable fudge, cook to the soft-ball stage, 236-240F, which is what the penuche half of the entry calls for.
- Soft ball, in numbersA drop of syrup that flattens into a soft ball between the fingers in cold water is 234-240F. Below 234F the fudge will not set; above about 244F it turns dry and short.
- Maple sugarOne pound of hard maple sugar is about 2 1/4 to 2 1/2 cups grated or crushed. Modern granulated maple sugar works directly; maple syrup does not substitute one for one, since the recipe's liquid balance assumes a solid sugar.
- Kettle and fireUse a heavy-bottomed saucepan holding at least three times the volume of the mixture, since milk and sugar climb sharply as they boil. Medium heat throughout; scorched milk solids taste of it in the finished candy.
- The hinge is when you start stirringBoth mixtures should be taken off the heat and left to cool undisturbed to about 110F before beating. Stirring a hot syrup throws large crystals and gives gritty fudge; the granulation "around the edge of the kettle" is the sign that fine crystals have finally begun, and pouring must follow immediately.
- Butter goes in at the endAdd the butter off the heat, or at least after boiling has begun, as the original does. Fat present from the start interferes with the crystal structure the beating is meant to build.
- Penuche nutsHickory nuts are a foraged item now; pecans behave much the same and English walnuts are named in the original. Toast them first and add with the vanilla, after the syrup has cooled.
- YieldThe original gives no pan size. A batch of this size will roughly fill an 8-inch square pan and cut into something in the order of two dozen small squares; the two batches are not identical in bulk. Score while still warm, cut when fully cool.
Maple sugar was the cheap sweetener of the northeastern United States and eastern Canada long before cane sugar became affordable inland, and hard cakes of it were still a farm commodity in the period this book comes from, which is why the recipe measures it by the pound rather than the cup. "Penuchie" is one of many English spellings of penuche, generally traced to Mexican Spanish panocha, a term for unrefined brown sugar; the name traveled into American candy-making as a label for the plain brown-sugar fudge that needs no chocolate. Both recipes belong to the period after home cooks gained reliable access to granulated sugar and cheap milk, when fudge became a common social-occasion confection, taught by the cold-water test because kitchen thermometers were not yet a usual kitchen fitting.