Each year on May 12th, National Nutty Fudge Day tempts you to indulge in smooth chocolate fudge filled with crunchy nuts.
- In 1886, a letter was found written by Emelyn Battersby Hartridge a Vassar College student in Poughkeepsie, NY about her Baltimore, MD cousin. It referred to a fudge her cousin had made and sold for 40 cents per pound. Hartridge obtained the recipe, and in 1888, she made 30 pounds of fudge for the Vassar College Senior Auction.
- In 1886, fudge was sold at a local Baltimore grocery store for 40 cents a pound. This is the first known sale of fudge.
- A recipe for “Fudges at Vassar” was printed in The Sun in 1895.
- It is believed that someone was making caramel when they “fudged” up the recipe. The result was delicious, but the name stuck even as fudge grew in popularity.
- Late in the 19th century, some shops on Mackinac Island, Michigan, began to produce similar products as the Vassar College fudge and sold it to summer vacationers. Fudge is still made in some of the original shops there today.
- The word fudge means to put together clumsily or dishonestly, and the term dates back to the late 1700s. The term may have originally derived from the word “fadge”, which means to make suitable or fit, a term used since the late 1500s.
- Another story goes, that a college lecturer in Virginia, was teaching a class in toffee making, and the temperature was not taken high enough resulting in what we now know as fudge.
- Americans normally make fudge with chocolate and Europeans often use butter, sugar and cream in the ingredients.
- Fudge is a Western confection idea.
- Fudge is one of the most popular desserts in the United States.
- Pecans and walnuts are most often used in nutty fudge recipes.
- Composer/songwriter Cole Porter (1891-1964) was a fudge lover. He had 9 pounds of it shopped to him each month.
- The Oxford English Dictionary has its first example from as late as 1896, in which the writer describes fudge as “a kind of chocolate bonbons.”
- We know that cooper kettles are a great conductor of heat. That is why copper kettles are usually used to make fudge. It also belongs to the old way to make fudge.
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