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This small recipe from 1915 shows a new American candy at an early stage. It is made with brown sugar, golden corn syrup, chopped walnuts and two beaten egg whites. It’s also a reminder of how home cooks of the 1910s made sweets. They boiled sugar to the ‘hard ball’ stage on the stovetop, testing it in cold water if they had no thermometer, and cut the candy into squares.
Please note that some of the images in this article were created with the assistance of AI.
From Candy-Making at Home, 1915
About This Recipe
This divinity comes from Candy-Making at Home, a small book of two hundred candy recipes by Mary M. Wright (Mary Mason Wright, born 1870), published by the Penn Publishing Company of Philadelphia in 1915. Wright wrote for home cooks, arguing that most candies could be made with ordinary kitchen tools and that homemade candy was ‘pure and clean’ and cost no more than the cheaper store-bought grades. Divinity was still a fairly new American candy then, and food historians connect it to corn syrup; Karo, the best-known brand, had only come out in 1902. Wright’s version uses light brown sugar and golden corn syrup, so it would have come out tan rather than the snow-white candy many people picture today. She boiled the syrup to the hard ball stage, testing it in cold water if there was no thermometer, and stirred the walnuts in before pouring it over the beaten egg whites, unlike several other early versions that added the nuts afterward.
Mary M. Wright · page 48–49
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The Page, as Printed in 1915
Mary M. Wright, Candy-Making at Home (The Penn Publishing Company, Philadelphia, 1915), p. 48–49. Transcribed from the original scan.
The recipe · 1915
Divinity Fudge
From Candy-Making at Home by Mary M. Wright (1915), page 48–49. Every word below is as printed.
Ingredients
- two cupfuls of light brown sugar
- one-half cupful of golden corn syrup
- one-half cupful of water
- one cupful of chopped walnut meats
- one teaspoonful of vanilla
- the stiffly beaten whites of two eggs
- Beating hot syrup into egg whites is a long-standing safe candy method, but for young children, pregnant people, older adults or anyone with weakened immunity, use pasteurized eggs.
- Hard-ball sugar syrup is extremely hot and can cause severe burns, so pour it slowly and keep children away.
Method
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Combine the sugar, syrup and water
Take two cupfuls of light brown sugar, add one-half cupful of golden corn syrup, and one-half cupful of water.
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Boil to the hard-ball stage
Boil to the hard ball stage.
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Add walnuts and vanilla, pour over the whites
Add one cupful of chopped walnut meats, and one teaspoonful of vanilla; and then pour over the stiffly beaten whites of two eggs.
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Beat until light and foamy
Beat up until light and foamy.
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Pour into pans and mark into squares
Pour into buttered pans, and when cool mark off into squares.
Source: Mary M. Wright, Candy-Making at Home (The Penn Publishing Company, Philadelphia, 1915), p. 48–49. View the original page (Internet Archive, scan from The Library of Congress).
The original recipe text and page scan are from a work published in 1915 and are in the public domain in the United States. The history and notes are Piaci Pizza’s own writing. Brand names that appear in historic recipes are mentioned as historical fact only. Illustrations are AI-generated in a vintage style. The recipe is shown exactly as it was published in 1915; we have not photographed a test batch.
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