Dropped in your mouth, the creamy rich thick chocolateness is almost like a soft truffle, but a few bites in and you sense its gritty aftertaste left on your molars, sugar crystals not yet dissolved, and you know you are eating a memory. Our glorious family tradition of fudge at Christmas.

A totally British word, it first showed up as a noun in 1766 and meant a piece of foolish nonsense. Kinda like a British ‘bunkum’ or ‘twaddle’…but not as digestible. Ancestry.com seems to think we have about 25 percent British/Irish Isles in us…not sure how that happened as most family lines shoot reliably back to Die Mutterland and Scandinavia. So how do we account for our Anglo-Saxon taste buds? Those Vikings were known to plunder Irish shores….a heritage of mishap, perhaps?

Nobody called fudge glorious food until about the early twentieth century when a letter mentioned it was made and sold at an 1892 senior auction at Vassar College.*

So most people see it as a glorious mistake.

My sister might have thought the same thing as she tried to melt her Whole Foods rocklike brown organic gently raised sugar crystals along with ethically harvested chocolate into our mom’s clear Pyrex double broiler this year at my house and found that they didn’t quite behave like C&H Pure Cane sugar and Hershey’s…(first time we made fudge at my house, not our parents…but that’s another post).

The final product was much as I remembered, but unlike my well organized, gift-giving mother, the postman didn’t get a sample (ours leaves mail sticking out of the box when it rains and ‘forgets’ to take stamped letters, leaving us nastygram Post-its claiming “he can’t see letters that hide.”)

Like Post-its, fudge was not intentional. In the words of The Calico Cottage, “When this glorious accident occurred is also unknown. Dictionaries from as early as 1811 denote the word fudge as meaning “nonsense,” and later define it as “to fabricate or contrive in a careless or blundering manner; bungle.”

Back to Pyrex.

My stove is not pretty (it’s a 1980s replacement for a 1950s countertop electric stove), so I grace you with a prettier version of what our mother MaryAnn’s Pyrex broiler would have looked like if it wasn’t on my knarly stove, and if my sister wasn’t using it to cook her glorious fudge (she’s not the kind of person who cleans while she cooks).

Beyond just the spending time with my sisters making food in my kitchen, I love that we have a multi-generational use of Pyrex, as I stored Melissa’s fudge in my Pyrex 9×12 baking dish with dark blue plastic lid that never puckers when dishwashered. Said dish was purchased about 10 years ago when I realized that parenting involved showing up at Montessori potlucks with homemade main dishes that weren’t sushi related.

Note the fine glaze of cholesterol along the sides…

I’m not sure how this blunder of a a dessert ended up as our family’s tradition. But I’m thrilled Melissa is keeping up the blunder. Or shall we rename this as a History of Plunder. The fridge, that is.

A great-grandmother’s embroidery (Hedebo?)