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Chocolate Fudge
1 cupful milk Pinch of salt 2 squares (2 ozs.) chocolate 2 cupfuls sugar 1 tablespoonful Crisco 1 teaspoonful vanilla extract Put Crisco, milk, sugar, salt, and chocolate into saucepan, and stir and boil until it forms a soft ball when tested in cold water, or 240° F. Remove from fire, add extract, allow to stand a minute, and beat until creamy.
Pour into Criscoed tin and mark off into squares. 4 cupfuls sugar 1 cupful Crisco
A straightforward soft-ball fudge, but the ingredient list as printed has been scrambled — milk and salt appear in the method with no quantities given, and two stray lines from a neighbouring recipe have attached themselves to the end.
- The missing milkThe method calls for milk but the list omits it. Standard fudge of this type uses about 3/4 cup of whole milk to 2 cups sugar; the original gives no figure, so treat any amount as a reconstruction rather than the author's.
- The stray lines"4 cupfuls sugar" and "1 cupful Crisco" at the end do not belong to this ingredient list; they look like text carried over from another recipe. Ignore them. The salt is likewise unquantified; a pinch is the usual reading.
- Chocolate squaresA "square" is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, which matches the recipe's own "(2 ozs.)". Modern bars are scored in varying sizes, some in half-ounce sections — weigh rather than count.
- CriscoCrisco in 1913 was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, firmer and blander than the soybean/palm blend sold now. Any solid vegetable shortening works; unsalted butter gives better flavour at the cost of the book's whole point.
- 240°F is the hingeUse a candy thermometer and pull the pan at 240°F. Soft-ball stage runs roughly 235–245°F; cook well past it and the fudge sets hard and crumbly, well short of it and it stays soft. The cold-water test is the period method and works, but a thermometer is more repeatable.
- The rest before beatingStanding off the heat begins the cooling that keeps beating from throwing large sugar crystals. The recipe's single minute is far shorter than the cooling to lukewarm that later fudge method calls for; beat while the syrup is still hot and the texture goes grainy.
- Beat until it dulls"Creamy" means the gloss goes off and the mass thickens and holds a ribbon. Pour promptly after that; the working window is short.
- Pan and yield"Criscoed tin" is simply a greased pan; a small pan such as a loaf tin or 8x4 gives a usable depth for this quantity. Expect roughly 1 lb of fudge. Mark the squares while warm and cut when fully set.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, which had introduced Crisco two years earlier as the first widely marketed all-vegetable hydrogenated shortening. The book's job was to persuade cooks that a cottonseed-oil product could stand in for butter and lard everywhere in the kitchen, which is why a tablespoon of shortening turns up in a fudge that scarcely needs it — the fat smooths the crystal structure a little and keeps the candy from sticking, but its real function on the page is advertisement. Fudge itself is generally traced to American women's colleges in the 1880s and 1890s, where by the traditional account it could be made over a gas ring in a dormitory room; by the time this book appeared it was firmly established as a home-kitchen sweet.