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Chocolate Nut Fudge
3/4 cup Karo, Red Label 2 cups sugar 21/2 squares (ounces) cooking chocolate 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup milk 1 teaspoon vanilla 3/4 cup chopped nut meats Combine the ingredients (except nuts and vanilla) in the order given, and cook until the mixture forms a soft ball when tried in cold water, 238 degrees F.; cool until tepid, add vanilla and nuts and beat steadily until thick and creamy. Pour into a. medium-sized oiled pan, and when almost cold, cut in squares.
A straightforward boiled fudge whose success depends almost entirely on temperature discipline rather than ingredients. Two of its terms have shifted since printing.
- The hinge: cool before beatingDo not stir or beat the syrup once it comes off the heat. Let it fall undisturbed to roughly 110F — tepid to the back of a finger — and only then add vanilla and nuts and beat. Beating a hot syrup throws large sugar crystals and gives grainy fudge; this is the single step that decides the batch.
- Karo Red LabelThat was the dark grade of Karo, cut with refiner's syrup, and it carries a mild molasses note. Ordinary dark corn syrup is the direct equivalent; light corn syrup works but gives a paler, blander fudge. The syrup is not just sweetener — it interferes with crystal growth and is why the texture comes out creamy.
- Cooking chocolateThis means unsweetened baking chocolate, not semisweet. Modern bars are scored in 1-ounce squares, so 2 1/2 squares is 2 1/2 ounces — and the recipe's own parenthesis, "(ounces)," confirms it.
- 238FTrust the thermometer over the cold-water test, and clip it so the bulb sits in liquid, not against the pan bottom. If you are much above 1,000 feet, subtract about 1F for every 500 feet of elevation or the fudge will set hard.
- The panUse a heavy saucepan of at least 2 quarts. Milk and sugar scorch readily, and the mixture climbs as it boils. Stir only until the sugar dissolves, then leave it alone and wash any crystals from the sides with a wet brush.
- Medium-sized oiled panAn 8-inch square pan gives fudge roughly half to two-thirds of an inch thick. Oil it lightly rather than butter it heavily; the recipe wants release, not a greasy face.
- Yield and cuttingThe recipe gives no yield; an 8-inch pan cuts into roughly 36 squares. Cut while the surface is still faintly warm — fully cold fudge crumbles at the knife rather than parting.
This appears to come from one of the promotional cookbooks issued by corn-syrup makers in the first decades of the twentieth century, when Karo was sold in colour-coded grades — blue label for light, red label for dark. Such booklets existed to demonstrate that corn syrup was not merely a cheap sweetener but a technically useful one, and fudge was a good argument: the glucose in corn syrup does inhibit sucrose crystallisation, so a fudge made with it is more forgiving than one made with sugar and milk alone. Fudge itself is generally traced to American women's colleges in the 1880s and 1890s, where it spread through handwritten recipes, and by the time this booklet was printed it had become standard home confectionery. Filing it under "Unusual Recipes" says more about the chapter headings of promotional literature than about the candy, which was by then thoroughly ordinary.