Category: recipes

1911 Chocolate Fudge Recipes

16-year-old Helena Muffly wrote exactly 100 years ago today:

Wednesday, April 5, 1911: But now I have changed my opinion. I believe I will have a good time tomorrow. I assisted my sister in making chocolate fudge tonight.

Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:

I found two recipes for chocolate fudge in a 1911 cookbook:

Fudge

Chocolate Fudge, No. 1—Three cups sugar; one cup cream or rich milk; one-half cake of chocolate and piece of butter the size of an egg. Boil slowly until grains form on the edge of the kettle. Add a tablespoon of vanilla and beat vigorously for a few minutes. Pour into a buttered pan and mark off in squares.

Chocolate Fudge, No. 2—Two cups brown sugar; one-half cup of butter; one-half cup of milk; one-fourth cup of molasses. Boil ten minutes. Then add two squares of chocolate and boil three minutes longer. Beat until thick, adding a teaspoon of vanilla.

The Butterick Cook Book: With Special Chapters About Casserole and Fireless Cooking (1911) by Helena Judson

I decided to make both recipes—and then have a taste-testing to see which was better. First I ‘translated’ the recipes into modern terms. For recipe No. 1, I guessed that a cake of chocolate was 1/2 pound of unsweetened chocolate and that the recipe therefore was calling for 1/4 pound of chocolate (4-one ounce squares).

I decided to use 1/4 cup of butter for ‘butter the size of an egg’. I used heavy whipping cream for the cream or rich milk.

And, I decided that ‘beating’ within the context of 1911 probably meant stirring rapidly with a spoon.

Before pouring each mixture into a buttered pan to cool, I divided the mixtures into half and added chopped walnuts to one half.

After the fudge hardened I conducted a taste test with readily available people (in other words, with my husband).

Both recipes made acceptable fudge—though Recipe No. 1 tasted more like the fudge we typically eat today. Recipe No. 2 had interesting complex undertones from the molasses—which seemed a bit strong in the plain fudge, but when we compared the fudges that contained the walnuts—the molasses really complemented the taste of the walnuts.

If any of you are hungry for some old-fashioned sweets, I’d encourage you to try these recipes.—And, let me know if you translated these recipes for modern cooking differently than I did, and whether you preferred recipe No. 1 or No. 2.

Buckwheat Pancakes (Griddle Cakes)

15-year-old Helena wrote a hundred years ago today:

Monday, January 23, 1911. Here’s Monday, another school day. It’s so hard to get up awful early, when you feel nice and sleepy.

Her middle-aged grand-daughter’s comments 100 years later:

Sometimes I wish that Grandma provided more detail when she wrote. For example, I wonder what Grandma ate for breakfast.  I imagine that it was similar to what I ate two generations later when I was growing up on another farm near McEwensville—but I might be totally wrong.

Buckwheat Griddle Cakes with Current Conserve

In January we generally ate pancakes (griddle cakes) for breakfast. We often ate pancakes made from a mix, but occasionally had the more traditional buckwheat griddle cakes that I envision would have been eaten when Grandma was young.  After the pancakes were cooked I’d put maple syrup or jam on mine—but my father always put old-fashioned liverwurst on his. We only had pancakes when liverwurst was available, and that was only during the winter months when my family or a neighbor butchered a hog.

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I love to go to flea markets in central Pennsylvania with my father—

One find was a promotional cookbook published by KC Baking Powder in 1911 that contains a recipe for Buckwheat Griddle Cakes. I decided to make the recipe to see if they were like the buckwheat cakes I remembered.

 KC Buckwheat Griddle Cakes

1 cup buckwheat flour

1 tablespoonful sugar

3 level teaspoons baking powder

1 ¼ cups cold water

1/3 teaspoonsful salt

Sift together, three times, the flour, sugar, salt, and baking powder*; stir the water in all at once and bake immediately on a hot well-oiled griddle. Buckwheat flour calls for a generous measure of baking powder. Part milk may be used to mix the cakes but water give quite as good results.

 The Cook’s Book: KC Baking Powder (1911)

*I just stirred the ingredients together and didn’t sift anything. I’m not sure why old-time cookbook authors were obsessed with sifting.

 I was surprised how few ingredients there were, but from looking through the cookbook I realized that most recipes a hundred years ago had very few ingredients. I guess that since people cooked from scratch every day that they gravitated toward simple recipes.

After I’d cooked the griddle cakes—I poured some maple syrup on them and took a bite. They were very good though the robust taste of the buckwheat was a prominent undertone.

I then remembered that I had a jar of homemade current conserve  that a friend of my daughter’s had given me. (An aside–I think that it’s really cool how some young people care enough about what they eat to revive traditional cooking and food preservation).  I spooned a little conserve on the griddle cakes and took a bite—and the taste was awesome. The tartness of the conserve wonderfully complemented the robustness of the griddle cakes—and I almost felt like I had drifted back to Grandma’s day.