American Chocolate Fudge

Many of the world’s favorite sweets and confections have been around for a long time – a really long time. Ice cream, for example, is some 5,000 years old.

But fudge – American-style fudge, the kind that contains chocolate – is a relatively recent invention.

The rich chocolate treat we have come to know and love seems to have been stumbled upon at the tail end of the 19th century. Some Food Historians claim to have zeroed in on the date, marking February 14th, 1886 as fudge’s official birthday. Sources suggest that Fudge derived its name from the exclamation, “Oh, fudge!” when its creator botched a batch of caramels by allowing the sugar to crystallize.

One of the earliest – if not the earliest altogether – documented references to fudge was found in a letter from one Emelyn Battersby Hartridge, a student at Vassar College in New York.

In the letter, Hartridge noted that her cousin made fudge and sold it for 40 cents a pound. Hartridge got her cousin’s recipe and made about 30 lbs of fudge for a senior auction. The treat was an immediate success and caught on as a staple in women’s colleges everywhere.

In the following decade – recipes and combinations of ingredients similar to Hartridge’s own “original” creation started popping up in shops on Mackinac Island in Michigan. To this day, some of those shops still produce products from their time-tested, 19th-century recipes.

How Fudge Is Made

Fudge is a version of fondant, although it’s drier than its common, cake-topping sibling. It’s made by boiling sugar in milk and letting it mature to the “soft-ball” stage (between 224 and 238 degrees Fahrenheit).

After that, you beat the milk-and-sugar mixture as it cools. This allows the fudge’s smooth, creamy, melty texture to develop throughout