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Chocolate Candy
Two cupfuls of granulated sugar, one cupful of rich milk, a tablespoonful of butter, one-quarter of a cake of chocolate; boil for twenty minutes, stirring constantly; beat for five minutes after taking from the fire. Do not let it cook too long. Cut into squares just before it cools.
This is early fudge, from the years when the technique was still being written down as "chocolate candy." The recipe gives a time where it should give a temperature, and that is the one thing worth fixing before you start.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockTwenty minutes is only an approximation of the soft-ball stage. Use a candy thermometer and pull the pan at 236-238F; timing varies a good deal with the width of the pan and the strength of the flame. The warning to "not let it cook too long" suggests the author knew the time was only a rough guide.
- A cake of chocolateBaking chocolate of this period was commonly sold in half-pound cakes scored into squares, so a quarter cake is probably about 2 oz of unsweetened chocolate; sizes were not wholly standard. Such cakes were usually unsweetened, and the two cups of sugar assume it. If you substitute a sweetened bar the candy will be cloying.
- Rich milkThis means unhomogenized whole milk with the cream still in it, or milk with a little cream added. Whole milk works; half-and-half is closer to the intent and gives a smoother set.
- The pan mattersMilk and sugar over twenty minutes of direct heat scorch easily, which is why the recipe says to stir constantly. Use a heavy-bottomed saucepan at least three times the volume of the mixture, since it climbs when it boils.
- The beating is the hingeModern confectionery practice is to let the pan stand off the heat until it drops to about 110F before beating, then beat until the gloss dulls and the mass thickens and lightens; note that this departs from the recipe, which has you beat straight off the fire. Beating while it is still hot gives coarse, grainy crystals; that step, not the boiling, decides the texture.
- Pour and score promptlyTurn it into a buttered shallow pan (the recipe names none) and mark it into squares while still soft, as instructed. Once fudge sets hard it fractures rather than cuts.
- YieldAbout a pound of candy, or 16 to 25 squares depending on how you score it.
Fudge appears in American print in the 1880s and 1890s, and is generally traced to women's college kitchens in the Northeast, where students made it over gas lamps and chafing dishes and passed handwritten copies around; Vassar, Smith and Wellesley all have claims of the traditional rather than documented sort. Its arrival depended on cheap granulated beet and cane sugar. Turn-of-the-century recipes for boiled sugar sweets rarely mention a thermometer, since one was not yet standard household equipment. What the cook was expected to know instead was the feel of the mixture and the moment the gloss left it under the spoon.