Since writing in passing about fudge in connection with Oh Henry! bars, I have been reminded that this is the second time in so many days that the uncertain identity of fudge has come up. Looking at a package of Fudge Covered Ritz that a friend brought back from America, I wondered aloud what it was that made them fudge-covered as opposed to chocolate-covered. She speculated that it was because they weren’t made with real chocolate, and I could well imagine that the big wheels down at the Ritz factory would have no truck with such obviously second-rate language as “chocolatey.” Fudge, in this case, seems an inspired evasion.
But thinking about Oh Henry! bars, and how alien the “fudge” therein has always seemed to my image of fudge, got me wondering what’s up with fudge, anyway? What makes fudge fudge, and where does it come from? I ended up hauling out both volumes of my monstrous Oxford English Dictionary, because curiously fudge in its present usage only makes it into the supplement of the 1971 edition, appearing on page 3,972 of the second volume, as the fifth sense of the word: “A soft-grained sweetmeat prepared by boiling together milk, sugar, butter, and chocolate or maple sugar.” Of US origin, 1897 (why it took more than a half-century for this sense of the word to make it into the dictionary is anyone’s guess).
The rest of the not-inconsiderable space devoted to fudge has to do with the term as something shouted to express incredulity or disfavour: “Contemptible nonsense, ‘stuff,’ bosh,” or the not altogether different:
To fit together in a clumsy, makeshift, or dishonest manner… To make (a problem) look as if it had been correctly worked, by altering figures; to conceal the defects of (a map or other drawing) by adjustment of the parts, so that no glaring disproportion is observed; and in other like uses. (vol. 1, p.1090)
Both of the latter meanings I had assumed followed upon the confectionary sense, although it appears that these others enjoy priority by a good two hundred or so years. Both senses are of obscure and potentially unrelated origin, although possible candidates include the namesake of some lying pig of a seventeenth-century English sea captain, and still curiouser, “An onomatopoeic alteration of FADGE (v.), with the vowel expressive of more clumsy action.” Not to interrupt your head-scratching, because it took me a minute to figure this one out, too, but fadge is an obsolete term meaning to fit well, or make fit well, get along, or fit well into place. Fudge, then, is almost its opposite, a clumsy dissembling of fadge: hence fudge is a fudging of the word fadge. I know, right?
On top of this, a few hundred years later, you have American boarding-school debs applying the term to a delicious sugary confection that gradually makes its way into the lexicon, as I understand it, as a thing-in-itself. Perhaps I’m just out of the loop on this, but do people in general think of fudge the food as some kind of chump job trying to pull a fast one? If so, what is it trying to pass itself off as? It’s a brown square.