Home › Candy Making › Chocolate Fudge
Chocolate Fudge
For chocolate fudge, put one pound of granulated sugar and one cupful of cream into a saucepan and let it come to a boil. In the meantime dissolve two squares of chocolate in a little of the cream. As soon as the sugar and cream boil, turn in the chocolate and half a teaspoonful of vinegar and cook for ten minutes after it begins to boil, or until it spins a hair. Flavor with very little vanilla. Remove from the fire and stir briskly for three minutes at least; pour into shallow greased tins and when cold, cut in squares.
A straightforward old-style fudge, but it relies on two visual cues that a thermometer now settles for you. Read the notes on the sugar stage before you start, because that is where this one is won or lost.
- The hinge: what stage to cook to"Spins a hair" belongs with the thread stage, usually given as roughly 230-235F, which is short of where fudge sets firm. Modern fudge is generally taken to the soft-ball stage, about 234-240F. The recipe offers ten minutes of boiling as an alternative cue, but pan, heat and quantity all affect that, so trust the thermometer over the clock.
- Weights and squaresA pound of granulated sugar is about 2 1/4 cups. "Two squares of chocolate" means the old 1-ounce baking squares, so 2 ounces of unsweetened chocolate; today's bars are often 1/2 ounce a square, so check the wrapper and weigh.
- CreamThe recipe says only "cream," which at this date could mean anything from thin to very rich. A heavy or whipping cream is the safer reading for a fudge, since the fat helps keep the finished sweet short and tender rather than brittle.
- Why the vinegarThe half teaspoonful of vinegar is an acid that inverts some of the sucrose as it boils, which discourages large crystals from forming. Corn syrup, common in later recipes, serves a similar crystal-blocking purpose by a different route. Do not increase the vinegar: too much invert sugar can leave the fudge soft or refusing to set.
- Stirring off the heatThe brisk stirring is the crystallization step, and it matters more than any other action in the recipe. Note that the recipe has you stir the moment it leaves the fire; modern practice is to let the pan cool to about 110F first, then beat until the gloss dulls and the mass thickens, pouring as soon as that happens.
- Pan and yield"Shallow greased tins" suggests a depth of roughly half an inch. An 8-inch square pan suits this quantity, which should give something in the region of 1 1/4 pounds, or about three dozen small squares.
- Boil-overSugar and cream climb hard, so use a generously oversized saucepan. Beyond the chocolate and vinegar the recipe has you add at the boil, avoid stirring the boiling syrup, which can start crystals in it.
Fudge is one of the few confections that can be dated fairly closely to late nineteenth-century America, and it spread through women's colleges: recipes circulated as "Vassar fudge," "Smith College fudge" and "Wellesley fudge" in the 1890s, made, by the traditional account, over gas lamps and chafing dishes in dormitory rooms where cooking was officially discouraged. The name is generally traced to the older slang sense of fudge, meaning something botched or cobbled together, which fits a sweet that either sets or does not. Its later appearance in general cook books reflects a confection helped along by cheap granulated sugar and the ready availability of packaged baking chocolate in standard one-ounce squares.