OH FUDGE!

It began as a mistake.

According to Joyce White, CBS Sunday Morning Food Historian, the recipe for fudge came from chocolate caramels. “Someone in Baltimore,” she believes, “messed it up, or “fadged” it.”

Get it?

Making fudge is tricky. Basically, it’s sugar, butter, cream, or milk. Some recipes use condensed milk, corn syrup, or cornstarch. You can add anything from nuts and marshmallows to peanut butter and M&Ms. Flavors range from chocolate, rocky road, and vanilla to green tea, almond joy, and dill pickle.

Here’s the secret. You mix everything together, heat it to 237 F (114 C), cool it, then whip it to prevent hard sugar crystals from forming. If the temperature is too low or too high; if you don’t whip it while its cooling, the candy gets gooey, chewy, maybe grainy, and ends up as caramel or toffee.

Oh Fudge!

Let’s head back to college for enlightenment.

Life at the at the turn-of-the-nineteenth century was about progress, development, and change. Cities were growing, women were fighting for their rights, and inventions like telephones (1876), gasoline-powered horseless carriages (1896) and the Wright Brothers airplanes (1903), took flight.

In 1878 the nineteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution was introduced. Although not ratified until 1920, women demanded the right to vote. Suffragettes led the cause.

Women’s colleges remained traditional. They expected students to behave in a Victorian “ladylike” manner, controlling them with a long list of restrictions. Women were seen as delicate, built to eat bland food to preserve their health. Their goal in life should be marriage and motherhood.

Young women didn’t agree. “Illicit” snacking was pervasive in the dorms – rich treats, like fried oysters, were put on hat pins and “cooked” over stolen Bunsen burners and gas-jet lights.

Meet some of the feisty young ladies below.

Vassar College, Class of 1882, Creative Commons.

College men were encouraged to party and tear up the town. No fair.

Then came fudge.

According to White, “women would make fudge in their dorm rooms . . . in the late evening, trying to get away with something not condoned in the rule book.”

You might call it a well-mannered mutiny.

The Davenport Daily Tribune reported that “nearly every night a college girl may be found somewhere who is making [illicit] ‘fudges’ or giving a fudge party.”

Legend says it began at Vassar College. Student Emelyn Battersby Hartridge introduced fudge to her classmates. The recipe for “Vassar Fudge” later appeared in The Sun (1895). The idea quickly spread to other schools, like Wellesley College that tweaked the recipe with marshmallows and Smith College that used molasses.

It was a delicious fad and an act of rebellion.

Anne Ewbank in Atlas Obscura, recalled a popular 1893 ditty:

What perches us upon a chair

To stir a sauce-pan held in air,

Which, tipping, pours upon our hair —

Fudges.

Ewbank wrote that “some students defended themselves by pointing out that their food shenanigans were mild compared to those of their male counterparts” who drank whiskey, shot pistols at policemen, and clubbed baseball empires.

No contest.

Fudge eventually spread to beaches, boardwalks, fairs, tourist haunts, and candy stores around the world. Northwest Fudge Factory in Canada spent a week preparing a 5,760-pound slab of fudge – the largest in the world. The recipe for Mamie Eisenhower’s Million Dollar Fudge, loved by her husband, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower, became the rage. There’s even a National Fudge Day on June 16 that celebrates what they call a “happy accident.”

Today you can eat fudge straight, melted over ice cream, or in everything from cookies, candies, and cakes. Add it to muffins, pancakes, or cereals. Check out weird flavors like clotted cream, dirty coke, chocolate bacon, and purple yam. Purchase an Amazon t-shirt printed with “pretend I’m a giant piece of fudge,” read one of Judy Blume’s books about a mischievous kid named Fudge or get an authentic fudge cookbook.

Relish the sweet, smooth, yummy candy. Celebrate those defiant college ladies happily breaking the rules.

Savor every mutinous mouthful!