Peanut Fudge
2 cupfuls brown sugar 2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 cupful milk 1/4 teaspoonful salt 1 cupful chopped peanuts 1 teaspoonful vanilla extract Boil milk, sugar, Crisco, and salt until it forms a soft ball when tested in cold water, or 240° F. Remove from fire, add nuts and vanilla, beat until creamy. Pour into Criscoed tins, and when cool cut into cubes. "Now, good digestion wait on appetite and health on both."
A Calendar of Dinners January 1 *Black Bean Soup Roast Leg of Mutton, Currant Jelly
A straightforward brown-sugar penuche with peanuts. The only real variable is temperature, and the recipe already gives you the number.
- The hinge: cool before beatingThe instruction to "beat until creamy" the moment it comes off the heat is the one place this recipe misleads. Let the syrup fall to about 110°F undisturbed before you stir, or it will grain coarse and sandy rather than setting smooth.
- 240°F means 240°FSoft-ball stage is a narrow window. Use a clip-on candy thermometer and check it in boiling water first; a few degrees high gives you a brick, a few low and it never sets. At altitude, subtract roughly 2°F for every 1,000 feet.
- CriscoPlain vegetable shortening (hydrogenated cottonseed oil). Butter can be substituted and many will prefer the flavour, though it browns more readily and slightly softens the set. The two tablespoons are there for texture, not for frying.
- "Criscoed tins"A greased pan. An 8-inch square pan, buttered or lined with parchment, is right for this quantity.
- The pan mattersMilk and brown sugar catch easily. Use a heavy saucepan at least three times the volume of the mixture, since it climbs sharply as it boils, and stir only until the sugar dissolves.
- PeanutsRoasted, salted peanuts are best; if you use raw, toast them first or they taste flat and chalky against the caramel. Warm the nuts slightly so they do not chill the syrup when added.
- YieldSomewhere around 1¼ to 1½ pounds; the number of pieces depends on the pan and the depth of the slab. The recipe says to cut when cool, but do not let it go cold and hard, or it will crack.
- The stray textThe lines about good digestion and the January 1 dinner belong to the book's calendar of daily menus, not to the fudge; they have simply run on after the recipe.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with hydrogenated cottonseed oil, a product with no culinary tradition behind it, and its recipe section works methodically through every category a housekeeper might use fat in — including candy, where shortening had no established role at all. The fudge itself is what would more usually be called penuche or brown-sugar fudge, a soft creamed candy already circulating in American cookbooks and college lore from the late 1880s and 1890s. Peanuts were the democratic nut of the period, cheap, domestic and southern-grown, and they turn up constantly in the era's brittles, bars and fudges. The Shakespeare tag beneath the recipe is from Macbeth, and belongs to the book's calendar of daily menus rather than to the candy.