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Mexican Caramels
Heat a cup of granulated sugar by placing it in a saucepan and setting saucepan in oven. When hot, remove to top of stove and stir until melted, but not brown. As soon as dissolved, pour in a cup of cream, stirring all the time. When well mixed, add another cup of granulated sugar and also one of brown sugar. Boil until it reaches the soft ball stage when tested in cold water. Remove and stir in a cup of chopped nut meats and beat until creamy. Have ready a shallow tin, well buttered and pour in mixture to the depth of a half inch. When partially cool, cut in squares and wrap in paraffine paper. CHOCOLATE FUDGE, No. I-Three cups sugar; one cup cream or rich milk; one-half cake of chocolate and piece of butter the size of an egg. Boil slowly until grains form on the edge of the kettle. Add a tablespoon of vanilla and beat vigorously for a few minutes. Pour into buttered pan and mark off in squares.
CHOCOLATE FUDGE, No. 2-Two cups brown sugar; one-half cup of butter; one half cup of milk; one fourth cup of molasses. Boil ten minutes. Then add two squares of chocolate and boil three minutes longer. Beat until thick, adding a teaspoon of vanilla.
Three candies run together in one block of type: a dry-caramel penuche and two fudges. All three are thermometer work, and a thermometer will save every one of them.
- The hinge: melt, don't brownThe first cup of sugar is warmed in a low oven so it melts evenly on the stovetop without scorching; the book gives no temperature. Pull it off the heat the moment it is liquid and still uncoloured -- the recipe says melted "but not brown" -- since a dark caramel here turns the finished candy bitter.
- Adding cream to molten sugarThe mixture will boil up violently and throw steam. Warm the cream first, add it in a thin stream off the heat, and expect the caramel to seize into a lump — it dissolves again as the pan returns to the boil.
- Soft ball, in numbers234-240F on a candy thermometer. The cold-water test the book describes is reliable if you use genuinely cold water and work fast, but the thermometer is more repeatable. For Fudge No. 1, "grains form on the edge of the kettle" is a rougher visual cue for roughly the same stage.
- Beating temperatureBoth fudges and the caramels set their texture during the beating. Let the syrup cool undisturbed to roughly 110F before beating; beaten while hot, the sugar throws coarse crystals and the candy turns grainy.
- Half a cake of chocolateA cake of baking chocolate of this period was commonly 8 ounces, scored into eight 1-ounce squares, so half a cake is probably about 4 ounces, most likely unsweetened. On the same reckoning Fudge No. 2's "two squares" would be about 2 ounces.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons.
- The vanilla in Fudge No. 1A full tablespoon is heavy by modern taste and by modern extract strength; 1 to 2 teaspoons is nearer the mark. Add it after the syrup has cooled, or the alcohol carries the flavour off as steam.
- Paraffine paperWaxed paper. Parchment squares work as well and will not soften against a warm caramel.
- Pan and yieldAn 8-inch square tin gives roughly the half-inch depth called for in the caramels. Score while warm, cut through when fully set.
"Mexican" candies in American cookbooks of this era often meant brown-sugar candies in the family of panocha or penuche — the name generally traced to panocha/piloncillo, the unrefined cone sugar of Mexico — usually made with pecans or walnuts and often, as here, given a caramelized-sugar base for depth of flavour. The recipe's neighbours on the page are just as telling: fudge was still a comparatively new sweet, having spread through American women's colleges in the 1890s as a chafing-dish confection, and cookbooks of the period print two or three competing versions side by side because no single formula had yet settled. Butterick, a pattern company publishing for the home sewer and housekeeper, gathered these the way its readers traded them — briefly, by title and number, with the assumption that the cook already knew what a soft ball looked like in a cup of cold water.