The amazing origin stories of fudge, your all-time favourite confection 

Are you someone who has a sweet tooth? Well, then there’s a high chance that you enjoy gorging on fudge. Imagine this: It’s a weekend, and you have no pending tasks, and all you do is sit with a box of fudge and sit in front of the TV, waiting for a long-anticipated football match to start. Isn’t the lovely?  

This sweet candy has the essence of all its ingredients starting from sugar, butter, milk and cream to, of course, chocolate (that’s the most preferred flavour!) It falls somewhere in between fondant icing and hard caramels, and often has the deceptive appearance of chocolate bars. Do you know how they originated? There are multiple backstories behind the origin of these candies and all of them are equally fascinating. Let’s take you through them, one by one.  

Fudge was inspired by Scottish candy, tablet 
If you are a fudge lover, you might consider this hard-to-resist candy as an all-American treat. But there’s a chance that this isn’t true, and fudge may have been inspired by a Scottish candy named tablet. Okay, so what’s a tablet? Well, it’s made from the same ingredients as fudge, namely, sugar, milk (condensed in some cases) and butter. However, the only difference is, it is slightly grainier and not as rich as fudge. Anyhow, one thing is for sure, fudge was born in the late1800s.  

Fudge was an accidental invention 
Apart from the Scottish story, there is another version of the origin story of fudge. It turns out, fudge may have also been invented by accident. Oh, so how did this happen? Well, apparently, a baker in the USA was trying to make chocolate caramels. But he just tried out the wrong recipe. And the result was, as you can guess, a creamy textured treat that we know as fudge today. Interestingly, fudge derived its name from this accident as the baker had remarked “Oh, fudge!” when he didn’t get the desired result.  

Fudge may have been popularised by an American college student 
Now, let’s focus on what is perhaps the most popular origin story of fudge. For this, we have to go back to 1888. As in turns out, a student of Vassar College, USA, named Emelyn Battersby Hartridge, had written a letter about a candy saying that she has inherited a recipe from her friend’s cousin (who herself had tried the recipe in 1886 at Baltimore), who incidentally just liked her enough to have it. Later that year, Hartridge decided to try out the recipe first hand and thus the first batch of fudge (about 30 pounds) was born. She in fact went on to sell it all at a college fundraiser for 40 cents a pound.  

Guess the outcome? The candy became so widely popular that making fudge became a common practice among college-goers at that time, so much so, that soon, different US-based colleges such as Wellesley and Smith came up with their own unique recipes.  

Since then, fudge has been one of the most popular confections worldwide. In fact, there’s even a fudge capital of the world, that is located on the Lake Huron in Michigan. Have you ever heard about Mackinac Island? Well, it is home to many fudge outlets and produces 10000 pounds per day!