Does all the world eat fudge? Basically, you boil condensed milk, milk, butter and sugar until it'll set into a soft ball when a drop is put into ice-cold water, and then to stop it turning into toffee (or tablet, or taffee, or whatever you call it) you beat it briskly for five minutes. When it's set it should have a fine granular texture and be mouth-wateringly crumbly.
There's a recipe HERE. (Which, I must admit, I haven't tried.)
Anyway, this tin of fudge: based on a traditional Irish recipe, it says.
The stuff turned out to taste like Blu tack dipped in saccherine, so I had a look at the ingredients.
Glucose syrup, sugar, non-hydrogenated vegetable fat, sweetened condensed milk (milk, sugar) fondant (sugar, glucose syrup, water) cream (3%) emulsifier, mon- and diglycerides of fatty acids, flavouring, salt.
This product contains milk and may contain traces of soya, nuts and gluten.
Well, all I can say is, I'd be jolly interested to see a traditional Irish kitchen.
Word To Use Today: fudge. This word appeared in the 1800s, but sadly no one knows where it came from.
This is Blowing Rock Fudge Shop (photo by Claire Powers). It's plainly completely different stuff from British fudge, which looks like this:
photo by Smabs Sputzer
but I'm including the image because one of the flavours is labelled TURTLE.
The mind boggles.
My son invented Fludge last year - which is fudge that didn't set properly and was made on a day when it was raining a lot. We've never quite managed to recreate it...
ReplyDeleteYour boy is clearly a genius - and Einstein, who said that the definition of madness was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results had obviously never cooked. Let alone invented a new sort of sweet!
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