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Crisco Fruit Fudge
2 cupfuls sugar 1 cupful milk. 2 tablespoonfuls cocoa 2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 teaspoonful vanilla extract 1 teaspoonful lemon extract ½ cupful chopped English walnut meats ½ cupful sultana raisins 2 tablespoonfuls cream Pinch of salt Put Crisco, sugar, cocoa, salt, and milk into saucepan, and stir till it boils to 240°, or until it forms a soft ball when tested in cold water. Remove from fire, add raisins, cream, nut meats, and extracts, and beat mixture until thick and creamy. Put back on stove, and heat, stirring constantly until melted, then pour into Criscoed tins. When partly cool mark into neat squares.
Sufficient for thirty squares.
A soft-ball fudge from Procter & Gamble's own cookbook, written to prove that shortening could stand in for butter. The printed ingredient list here is defective — sugar and milk appear in the method but never in the list, and a stray "1 gill water" has drifted to the end — so read the two together before starting.
- Missing quantitiesThe method calls for sugar and milk that the list omits, and the orphaned "1 gill water" (half a cup) is never used in the instructions. Something in the range of 2 cups sugar to 1/2 cup milk would suit this quantity of cocoa and fruit, but the original figures are genuinely lost and any number you use is a reconstruction.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. Whether it belongs in place of the milk or alongside it is not recoverable from the text as printed.
- CriscoAny solid vegetable shortening. In 1913 it was newly hydrogenated cottonseed oil; today's product is a soybean and palm blend, and it behaves the same way here. "Criscoed tins" simply means a greased pan — an 8-inch square is right for thirty squares.
- 240F is the whole recipeSoft-ball stage. Below it the fudge will not set; much above it and you get a crumbly, sandy block. Use a thermometer and trust it over the cold-water test, which is hard to read once cocoa darkens the syrup.
- The reheating stepBeating the mixture thick and then returning it to the heat until "melted" is unusual and easy to overdo. Warm it only until it flows enough to pour, over the lowest heat, stirring the whole time; a hard boil at this point will grain the sugar you have just worked smooth.
- ExtractsA teaspoon each of vanilla and lemon is assertive by modern taste, and lemon with cocoa is very much of its period. Halve the lemon if you want the chocolate forward.
- SultanasSold now as golden raisins. Ordinary dark raisins work but are chewier; either way, add them off the heat as the recipe directs.
- Marking the squaresScore while the slab is still warm and pliable, then cut through once fully cold. Waiting until it is set hard gives ragged edges around the nuts.
The Story of Crisco was written by Marion Harris Neil, cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, and published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after Crisco went on sale. The book's job was persuasion: hydrogenated cottonseed oil was an unfamiliar substance, and every recipe in it quietly demonstrates that the new shortening could do what butter and lard did, in cakes, in frying, and — as here — in candy. Fudge itself was a young sweet at the time, generally traced to American women's colleges in the 1880s and 1890s, where it spread through Vassar, Smith and Wellesley as something students could make over a gas ring. That newness is part of why it appears here; a dish without settled tradition was an easy place to introduce an untraditional fat. The raisins and walnuts mark this as the fruit-and-nut branch of the family, closer to a confection than a plain chocolate slab.