Divinity in a sweet puff

Oct 28, 2023

By Mark Guydish [email protected]

A plateful of divinity.

Mark Guydish | Times Leader

Our test cook whips up some old-fashioned candy

Fairly simple ingredients for divinity, though you don have to separate the eggs and cook the sugars a good while.

Mark Guydish | Times Leader

I’ve come across occasional debates about what makes fudge fudge, and it happened again when MT took some of this week's preparation to the Times Leader Taste Testers, telling them it was "divinity fudge."

"When you said fudge, and then it was white, I was surprised," reporter Kevin Carroll said. "But it was delicious. I might like this kind of fudge better than regular fudge.

"I’m so confused. I don't know what to make of it," reporter Hannah Simerson said on first taste. After taking two more pieces, she decided "it's very light and sweet. I’m really into texture and I’m lovin’ this. She described the texture as "squishy and sponge-like."

One train of non-scientific thought is that it's not really fudge if you didn't have to cook something on the stove top. The more scientific argument deals with Hannah's "texture" part: Fudge, the argument goes, is about a texture caused by creating very tiny sugar crystals, which goes back to cooking on the stove.

Alton Brown gave a fairly detailed explanation of this process on his show "Good Eats" once, and you can read details on the "Fudge Factor" page of goodeatsfanpage.com. The short version: Heating water and sugar enough to have most of the water evaporate makes the sugar molecules move faster while giving them little choice but to crash into each other, forming the crystals.

By that definition, I guess this is fudge. The confusion probably comes from whipping the heated stuff into a few egg whites that were already whipped to stiff peaks.

It all proved surprising to several tasters.

"I’m flabbergasted. It's sweet and not sweet at the same time," page designer Lyndsay Bartos said. "I feel like there's something in it I can't define." MT noted it uses whipped egg whites. "Maybe that's it," Lyndsay said, "like meringue."

"It's very soft and chewy," page designer Ashley Bringmann said. "I feel like I could eat more of these." Reporter Margaret Roarty also said she wanted to eat more but felt she shouldn't. Understandable, as this is a lot of sugar and corn syrup and little else other than the stuff that gives it the unusual texture.

"It's too sweet for me. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone trying to lose weight," Bill O’Boyle said, which is certainly true. "I can't tell what it tastes like." he added

Reporter Jen Learn-Andes said "It melts in your mouth," which is a common response. While the outside hardens enough to give it some bite and chew, everything except the nuts rapidly starts dissolving.

"I agree with Jen. It melts in your mouth," MT said. "And since I carried a tin of divinity into the newsroom, that was one day I didn't feel tempted to raid Ashley's candy dish. Because I brought my own."

Editor Roger DuPuis took a stab at the etymology. "I can see how it got its name. If it goes back to Victorian times, or the early 20th century, people wouldn't have regularly had access to so much sugar, so it would have seemed heavenly. I had four pieces right off the bat."

A quick web search found nothing close to a definitive origin story. Most sites suggest it is an early 20th century confection, most likely in the U.S. But at least one argued there is evidence it goes a bit further, to the late 1800s. There's a version that puts the candy neatly into tiny paper cups with a whole pecan on top in the center (rather than the chopped almonds I folded in), prompting some speculation it's a southern thing.

So is it fudge? By my recollection, the first time I made this many decades ago, the recipe book called it "divinity fudge." But when rummaging around for recipes this time, I also found it called "divinity candy." And when I offered a piece to MT (always my first taste-tester, of course), she remembered an old Peanuts comic strip in which Lucy and Linus have a bit of sibling rivalry over "divinity."

I had no recollection of that, but I found this online:

Lucy (pulling plate away) "Just a minute, hold everything! Say ‘Oh dear sister with the sweet face and beautiful smile, may I have a piece of divinity?"

Linus: "Oh, dear sister with the sweet face and beautiful smile, May I have a piece of divinity?"

Linus standing alone with a smile while rubbing his tummy: "For divinity I’ll say anything, no matter how nauseating."

Dobru Chut!

Divinity (fudge?)

2⅔ cups sugar

⅔ cup light corn syrup

1/2 cup water

2 egg whites

1 teaspoon vanilla

⅔ cup chopped nuts

Stir sugar, corn syrup and water in pot over low heat until sugar is dissolved. Cook without stirring to 260° on a candy thermometer ("Hard ball" stage, when a small amount of mixture dropped into very cold water forms a hard ball).

In mixer bowl, beat egg whites to stiff peaks. Continue beating while pouring the hot mixture in a thin stream into the egg whites. Add vanilla and beat until mixture holds its shape and becomes slightly dull. Fold in nuts. Using two buttered teaspoons, drop about a spoonful from the tip of one spoon, using the other to push the candy off if necessary.

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Reach Mark Guydish at 570-991-6112 or on Twitter @TLMarkGuydish