Good morning!

Finally, appetite returns after the Dreaded Cold Virus... Finally!

Naturally, I immediately thought, "Fudge sauce on waffles!"

Nope. Whoel wheat toast, sans butter, and some sunflower nuts.

Today, I run errands for Mom, and listen to Mom tell me that 1. I want her to die during her cataract surgery (Monday next) and 2. she hates me for the eyedrop incident of my early teens (in which she ordered me to give her eyedrops after she wimped out, and to do so "like I do to you", and apparently Mom never forgave me for being her) and 3. she wants my assurance that she'll die if anything goes wrong in cataract surgery. 

Statistically, you're far more likely to have harm come to you on the way to and from aforesaid surgery, but hey! My mom's beeing grinding her imminent death in my face for days! Why stop now? ARGH!

Do I sympathize? Yes. Eyes. Scary. Do I want her to shut the fudge up so I can sleep at night and not have visions of her DNR order dancing in my head at 230AM? Yes, yes, I do. I'm human. I'm tired. I don't like being reminded that her life/death is in my hands. (No pressure!)...  Who does? OK, maybe some surgeons somewhere, but not *me*. THat's my mom, and I've spent years now being her advocate, her legal proxy, etc. It's a bloody stupid cataract surgery. She hates eyedrops and eye doctors. OK. But it's this or legal blindness in that eye, so... Let's stop talking life-death and start talking, "What book will you read first?"... Y'know. Optimistic stuff!

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So. Who invented fudge anyway? (Besides probably an ancestor of mine.)

Our first record of fudge comes from teh 1880s, when a store in Baltimore was selling it for $0.40 a pound, according to one story. That same story likes to say this originated from Vassar, where fudge was called "Vassar chocolates", but other  woemn's colleges liked the confection so much that the recipe and taste for fudge swept the highly-educated female portion of  the nation. This being the 1880s-1890s, of course, women did not often if ever attend the same colleges as men. (Vassar, Bryn Mawr, Wellesley, etc.). 

We can confirm that fudge is American.

What we don't know is why that origin story above says that the botched caramel candy was ever called "fudge". Allegedly, someone said, "Oh fudge!" as they mucked up the caramel. Since that word was used clear back to about 1800 to mean "bungle" (he bungled it = he fudged it) and to mean "nonsense" (what fudge!)... But we see no recipes until the last yearse of the 1800s... It may be true.

How exactly do you get from caramel (a boiling sugar syrup to which cream is added) to fudge (a generally chocolate confection including sugar and cream)? Well, if you add the cream (or milk) in with the sugar from the start? You don't get crystalized yummy buttery creamy caramel. You get... well, fudge. This is because you can't get the sugar to a high enough temperature without ending in some nasty scorched dairy product all over the place... Cream does odd things after certain temperatures, and you don't want them as a rule.

Another story says fudge was created when a toffee-making foray went awry. Since toffee involves cooking sugar and butter to a browned gooey muck, and in modern times topping with chocolate and/or stirring in nuts... I can see this one a bit more readily than botched straight caramels.

Anyway, fudge originally wasn't necssarily chocolate. You could  have anything in it as long as it had the texture (smooth) and the feel (not soft, not hard) and the texture shouldn't be dry or grainy, either. If you get dry fudge, btw, you can just re-melt it with a bit of milk and "start over". Re-cook it, and beat the dickens out of it.

Now, of course, fudge is usually chocolate. And we have corn syrup to keep things easy in the cooking, but I never use the stuff if I can avoid it, and so I just gotta deal with the possibilities when I make fudge.

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So... we don't know but we eat it anyway, and you can get it in fruit, nut, etc., flavors, as a chocoltae, or not-chocolate, and it's basically a calorie explosion, and I'll just eat the chocolate without all that fuss!

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Have a fudge-free Friday! (No nonsense, no blunders, I mean...)