From Panocha to Fudge: Mexican Roots of an American Candy

As Alfred Crosby (1972) observed, the conquest of Mexico was carried out not only by Spanish soldiers but also by nonhuman agents. Smallpox and other diseases killed millions of unprotected Native Americans, while cattle and sheep ravaged indigenous corn fields, and commercial crops like wheat and sugar displaced the local communal agriculture. As New Spain’s colonial society gradually recovered from the devastation of plagues and warfare, livestock were banished from the central highlands to the arid north and malarial coasts. Many ranchers, in turn, diversified their operations by planting sugar in river valleys since cattle did not eat cane (Chevalier 1963; Amith 2005). The complementarity of livestock raising and sugar growing extended to their byproducts. Cooking perishable milk with rough, brown sugar produced a shelf-stable and delicious candy, panochita de leche, which like the caramel dulce de leche found a ready consumer market among urban dwellers and mine workers around the turn of the nineteenth century.

Conquistadors quickly established sugar in New Spain, and unlike the great plantations of Brazil and the Caribbean, small-scale cultivation remained viable throughout the colonial era. Lowland river valleys provided abundant land for growing cane, whether by native tribute labor (encomienda), enslaved Africans, or free Indigenous communities. After the harvest, workers squeezed the cane between stone rollers to extract the sweet syrup. Large plantations installed Sicilian watermills with three rollers called ingenios, while mules and oxen powered more rustic peasant trapiches. The smallest mills, trapichillos a mano, were operated by hand as the name suggests. The scale of production also determined sugar quality and potential markets. Planters built elaborate boiling houses to skim off impurities, and then dried the sugar in earthenware cones sealed with clay. Molasses accumulated at the bottom, leaving a top cone of relatively pure “clayed” sugar that could be exported back to Europe. The cruder panocha from trapiches were sold on local markets, which flourished in the sixteenth century, benefitting ingenios and trapiches alike. Nevertheless, oversupply led to a collapse in prices as the colony’s population reached a post-conquest nadir in the seventeenth century. Plantations fell into ruins, and local markets relied on small trapiches such as one at Juxtlahuacan, Guerrero, owned by the Moctezuma family, which produced an annual average of 467 pesos worth of panocha plus sixty-two arrobas (bushels) of refined sugar from a mill described as “useless” (Amith 2005: 392). Small producers continued to supply urban markets, even as demand from a late-eighteenth-century silver mining boom revived the great sugar haciendas. Hungry miners and wealthy urbanites helped to double the price of sugar between 1770 and 1817. International factors also contributed to inflation as the revolt of enslaved workers in Saint-Domingue in the 1790s cut off Europe’s leading supplier of sugar. But increased exports of refined sugar and the growth of large plantations did not curtail and in fact increased domestic supplies of the byproduct, panocha (Martin 1985; von Wobeser 1988; Cardoso 1983).

The development of panochita de leche from European candied fruits and nuts can be seen already in the earliest extant Mexican manuscript cookbooks, from the late eighteenth century. Few of these volumes can be dated precisely, and most were likely composed in the last few decades of the century, making it impossible to offer a precise genealogy, but the dish combines elements of Iberian confectionery with New World sugar production. The term panocha likely derives from the sixteenth-century Spanish term for cob of thread (mazorca de hilo), panoja, which in the New World came to denote corn cobs and, by morphological analogy, cones of raw sugar (Academia Mexicana de la Lengua n.d.). In New Mexico, the term panochita is still used for a pudding of sprouted wheat eaten at Lent (Cabeza de Vaca Gilbert 1951 [1934]: 28). In a culinary context, the term panocha also referred to a stage in boiling certain sugar confections, possibly in reference to the preparation process of the unrefined sugar. These elements combined in a dish from the Avila Blancas manuscript with the obscure name condumbio de cacahuates, which instructed briefly: “Cook the panocha caramel to a high stage (punto), grind the peanuts well and add to the syrup” (Pérez San Vicente 1999: 140). Many other candied fruits were also prepared in this way. In 1805, panochitas de tamarindo y guayaba were reportedly served at the wedding of Ana Maria Huarte to the army officer Agustín Iturbide, who seized power briefly in 1822 as the first emperor of Mexico (Curiel Monteagudo 2004). Similar candies were also described as bocadillos, having changed from Iberian dried fruit preserves, marzipan, or flour-based pastries to sugar confections in the Americas. For example, the manuscript volume Cuaderno de Ignacita Belarde Calderón (1789: 23) gave the following instructions for bocadillos de coco (coconut): “For three pounds of well clarified sugar [boiled] already to the stage, beat until you make panochitas, add dried coconut and return to the fire…until it takes the point and curdles in the water, remove from the heat and turn out on paper.”

Recipes offer further clues about the origins of the technique in both sugar production and home confectionery. A hybrid recipe from the late eighteenth century for panochitas de leche attributed to Doña Dominga de Guzmán (1996: 148), provides an intermediate stage between candied fruit and nuts, on the one hand, and the fudge-like recipe with milk, on the other. “To a pound and four ounces of milk, half a pound of sugar, and if it is caramel with pumpkin, cook the pumpkin or tamalayote (squash) with a little quick lime (tequesquite) and then grind, and two pounds and half of milk and a pound of squash and two of sugar and [stir in] the saucepan until you can see the bottom, then pour into molds with orange blossom water.” The idea of stirring the cooling caramel to achieve the desired polycrystalline structure might have come from the technical skills of sugar processing, for which it is used to induce crystal nucleation in the final supercooled liquid (Barrett 1970: 58). Such a vigorous gesture was also known in the domestic sphere, albeit for a different material purpose, in making the classic Iberian nougat (turrón). A recipe for turrón in La cocinera poblana y el libro de las familias (The Puebla Cook and the Family Book 1877, vol. 1: 198) called for boiling sugar to the “stage of caramel or of panochita” before mixing it into the egg whites and beating until it cooled, then adding almonds and orange water. The high proportion of milk to sugar meant that the mixture had to be cooked down for a long time before reaching the soft-ball stage, which also recalls the slow evaporation process of sugar production.

Other recipes suggest the widespread innovations around the recipe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A manuscript volume published as Recetario novohispano: México, siglo XVIII (Novo Hispano Recipe Book: Mexico, Eighteenth Century, 2000: 61), instructed simply for bocadillos de leche: “To a quart of milk, half a pound sugar: [cook to] the stage of panocha.” A more descriptive recipe for bocadillos (Bustamante 1798–1832) shows the use of egg whites in clarifying sugar until it shines like “a mirror” before proceeding to add milk and cook to soft-ball stage. Yet another manuscript recipe specified “four panochas” as if they were sold in standard sizes in the market, while also specifying ball stage (asiendo bolita) (Piñones 1790–1820). Recipes also show the range of vernacular languages within Mexican confectionery. A manuscript from 1804 gives the following recipe for bocadillos de leche (Conserva de granaditas de China 1804: 9): “To a quart of sugar and a quart of milk cook to a syrup of half stage (medio punto) and make them dance the pio pio (se les da el pio pio) to the appropriate stage.” “Pio pio,” a folk song and dance from the Gulf Coast, provided a particularly sensory evocation of beating the mixture (Santamaría 1992: 857). Clearly the recipe was evolving through the innovative work of multiple hands.

The popular associations of panochita appear in descriptions from literary works and memoirs of the Independence era and the early Mexican Republic. Bibliographer José Mariano Beristáin de Souza writes in an 1813 letter to the author José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi, in which he describes his harsh critical style as “I am not one of those unscrupulous critics that smash an author over the head with panochitas de leche” (“Consejos a el pensador” 1813). Lizardi, in turn, incorporated panochitas in his moralizing novel of manners, La Quijotita y su prima (Little Miss Quijote and Her Cousin, 1831, vol. 4: 191), as being sold on the streets of Mexico City alongside fireworks and other goods. The popular associations were also confirmed about 1840 by the Scottish traveler Fanny Calderón de la Barca (1966: 384), who observed that at the hacienda of Cocoyotla, “They make panoja on this estate, cakes of coarse sugar, which the common people prefer to the refined sugar.” Liberal politicians and intellectuals Guillermo Prieto and Manuel Rivera Cambos recalled youthful visits to the suburban village of San Angel (now a neighborhood of Mexico City) to purchase panochita de leche and cheese, both made with milk from goats that were grazed at El Cabrío, a volcanic slope immortalized in 1863 by the landscape painter José María Velasco (Figure 2) (Prieto 1906: 141; Sánchez Salazar 2004: 406). A compendium of social types collected as Los Mexicanos pintados por sí mismos (Mexicans Painted by Themselves, 1855: 19) observed the children who delighted in panochitas de leche. Manuel Carrera Stampa (1961: 35), in his historical account, specified panochitas de leche blanca, perhaps a more refined version.

Panochita de leche became a perennial favorite with the origins of cookbook publishing in the early republic. El cocinero mexicano (The Mexican Chef, 1831), published by Mariano Galván Rivera, the most influential national cookbook of the nineteenth century, offered no less than ten variations on the theme, but denoting them as bocadillos and other terms rather than panochitas. This substitution might be an early indication that panochita was losing favor as a term for decent families, although the cocinero was not averse to indigenous terminology. The basic recipe used the interesting phrase “bring it to a boil until it forms ribbons” (298). A recipe called voladores o embarradillos de leche (“fliers or embankments,” references to plazas associated with street foods in Mexico City) called for the fudge to be served on white wafers, as cajeta is still served in Guanajuato and other parts of central Mexico (298). A version called jamoncillo (from “jamón,” or ham) was made with ground pumpkin seeds but without milk through the same process of boiling and stirring, while another used almonds (296–97). Another recipe repeated the bocadillo recipe that was clarified to resemble a mirror with only minor changes in language (298–99). Finally, there were recipes for making it with pitahayas (a brightly colored fruit), rose water, and coconut (299–301).

Other cookbooks began to circulate recipes as well. The Arte nuevo de cocina y reposteria acomodado a uso mexicano (New Art of Cooking and Pastry Accommodated to Mexican uses, 1828: 193–94), published in New York City, gave a recipe for bocadillos de leche that repeated the brief instructions from the Recetario novohispano, with the addition “then place the mixture into molds in the shape of tablets.” The Diccionario de cocina (Dictionary of Cooking, 1845: 85–86), a revised version of El cocinero mexicano of 1831, adjusted the language in one recipe, changing the desired texture from “ribbons” to a crisp, smooth “taffeta” (tafetan), and the quantities in another, calling for more sugar than milk. A recipe for jamoncillo in La cocinera de todo el mundo (Cook of the Whole World, 1844: 14) instructed: “Make the syrup to a dense syrup of thread stage (punto de hebra) and take off the fire: add two cups of pumpkin seeds well ground, and then beat to return to the fire beating unceasingly until it reaches the stage of caramel; then remove from the fire and beat it on the floor (suelo).” The recipe suggested dividing the batch, adding refined powdered sugar to half and placing it on a table or kitchen board (tablerito) so that the “jamoncillo turns a white color.” The recipe was repeated verbatim in the Arte novísimo de cocina aumentado, ó, Escelente colección de las mejores recetas (The Newest Art of Cooking Expanded, or Excellent Collection of the Best Recipes 1849: 207–8), which also copied the recipe for bocadillos de leche from the 1828 Arte nuevo de cocina. The Manual práctico de cocina of (Practical Manual of Cooking, 1877) called for using the syrup leftover from the chestnuts (another recipe, perhaps), adding water, boiled to the ball stage, and then taken from the heat and beaten with a wooden spoon.

Many of these works were likely written by men, but the recipes were also popular in domestic manuscripts and female-authored cookbooks, which flourished in the 1890s during a period of industrial modernization under the long-ruling President Porfirio Díaz. A charity community cookbook published in 1890 in Guadalajara called Recetas prácticas para la señora (Practical Recipes for the Housewife, 1890) included four versions of panocha de leche in addition to the original: one flavored with orange blossom water and cut into alfajores (round caramel sandwiches) or squares, another with vanilla and molded into shape, a third with almonds, and a fourth with flour. The recipe also continued to appear in manuscript volumes, such as one in the collection of the University of Texas at San Antonio (Cocinera Mexicana 1882). It is significant that these were largely circulated in the provinces.

Already by the 1890s, panochita had begun to fall out of fashion, at least in the capital, as the elite embraced French fashions over creole Hispanic traditions. The dish did not disappear completely, as can be seen from a menu including jamoncillo de leche as a dessert for October 4 in the Agenda para familia, conteniendo tabla para sueldo de criados by Carlos Toussaint (Agenda for the Family, Containing a Schedule for Payment of Servants, 1898: 321). Ireneo Paz also included six versions of panocha in his Diccionario del hogar (Dictionary of the Home, 1904). Nevertheless, appearances of panochita and its relatives became less prominent over time in published works, even as it remained popular among the working classes and in the provinces.

Spanish cultural traditions, which became creolized or adapted to colonial society through interactions with Indigenous peoples and local landscapes, also took root in the northern borderlands, including what is now the southwestern United States. This region, with arid plains cut through by river valleys, provided an ideal setting for the livestock and sugar complex that supplied confectioners with raw materials along the coasts of southern and central Mexico. As scholars have shown, Catholic priests were more or less successful in congregating the often semi- and fully nomadic Indigenous peoples of the north, using the unfamiliar and attractive sweetness of panocha to bring them to the missions. The nineteenth-century arrival of Anglo merchants and settlers created further demand for local sugar and candy makers. After the United States annexed the region in 1848, panochitas de leche came to be a characteristic taste of a nostalgic Spanish heritage. Together with chili con carne and tamales, the rustic sweet defined a unique and flavorful southwestern regional variant within an incipient industrialized national cuisine.

Panocha gained favor not only in Mesoamérica, as geographers have labeled the cultural area of Central and Southern Mexico, where maize agriculture supported complex societies with settled populations, but also in the neighboring region they called Aridomérica, including what is now Northern Mexico and the Southwestern United States, populated by smaller, more nomadic groups of hunters and gatherers and itinerant horticulturalists. The Spanish occupation of Aridomérica began with silver mines at Zacatecas, San Luis Potosí, and Parral, which were located on the traditional lands of Zacatecos, Guachichiles, and Tepehuanes, and other Indigenous peoples, who often earned cash working the mines alongside natives who migrated from Mesoamerica (Murillo 2016; Corbeil 2018). Panocha served as rations for mine workers as well as for troops stationed in presidios (forts) scattered across the borderlands. Priests also provided panocha along with flour, meat, and other goods to pay for Indigenous labor and to hold them on the missions, although these nomadic peoples continued to forage regularly, to the consternation of the fathers, who feared they would revert to their former ways (Hackel 2017; Deeds 2003). The Jesuit Father Ignaz Pfefferkorn (1989: 51) described a Sonoran trapiche of the late eighteenth century as a simple mill with a trough to catch the extracted juice and a large kettle for boiling it down. The sugar “remains quite brown because no one understands the art of refining, and also the utensils necessary for refining are lacking.” Another Jesuit, Joseph Och (1965: 136), reported offering panocha to newlyweds. In California, various Anglo observers noted the presence of panocha; for example, journalist Edwin Bryant (1848: 408) found it to be “a favorite sugar with the natives” and “in appearance is like our maple-sugar.” A sailor named William Heath Davis (1889: 246) later observed “panocha sold readily to the California people, who had a liking for sweet things and were very fond of it, the children eating it in lumps like candy, the grown people doing the same.”

The spread of panochita de leche to the northern borderlands cannot be documented with precision, but the circulation of both people and cookbooks had carried it throughout the region by the end of the nineteenth century. Encarnación Pinedo (Figure 3) included a recipe in her pioneering compilation of Californio cooking entitled El cocinero español (The Spanish Cook, 1898: 174). Born in 1848 to an elite California family that lost its land with the American invasion, she never married and was eventually forced to depend on the generosity of her Anglo brother-in-law. Pinedo dedicated the cookbook to her nieces in the hopes that they would carry on Mexican culture, even if she disguised it with a Spanish name (Valle 2003). The instructions for panochita de leche, like nearly a fifth of the 800 recipes, were taken from the Nuevo cocinero mexicano. A second recipe, for jamoncillos de almendra (almond fudge), was recorded in a New Mexico manuscript cookbook by Refugio Ruiz de Amador. From an elite Chihuahua family, she was born in Paso del Norte (El Paso) and married a New Mexico merchant named Martin Amador in 1859. Her eight children continued to move back and forth across the border. Her daughter Clothilde, for example, married Antonio Terrazas, a member of the Chihuahua political dynasty. Refugio made regular shopping trips to Bloomingdales in New York City but nevertheless retained connections with her Mexican roots through manuscript recipes for colonial desserts such as jamoncillos and torta de cielo (heavenly cake) (Ruiz de Amador n.d.).

This culinary nostalgia was also embraced by Anglo settlers eager to claim local culinary traditions for the Southwest, comparable to the mythical Pilgrim Thanksgiving of the Northeast or the so-called “Mammy” cooking of the Old South. The most popular expression of pastoral California appeared in Helen Hunt Jackson’s romantic novel, Ramona (1884), about an orphaned girl of mixed Scottish-Indigenous heritage and her doomed love for the son of a Native American chief. Boosters such as Charles Fletcher Loomis, editor of the Los Angeles Times, used the novel to promote tourism to Southern California. Scenes from the novel were recreated in motion pictures, postcards, hotels, and of course cookbooks (DeLyser 2004). One of the first of these volumes, Mary E. Johnston’s Spanish Cooking (1895a), offered instructions for a full feast in a fourteen-page booklet, including chili sauce, chili con carne, albondigas (meatballs), enchiladas, masa, tamales, frijoles, flour tortillas, chorizo, tomato rice, salsa, pumpkin colache, hot chocolate, and for dessert, panocha. The recipe called for four cups of brown sugar to one cup of milk and two cups of walnuts (Figure 4). Unlike Mexican versions of panochita, with a high proportion of sugar to milk, Johnston’s sugar-heavy recipe could be cooked to the proper stage more quickly, but perhaps at the expense of flavor. Some of the self-published copies expressed nostalgia for the seeming disappearance of Indigenous tribes with an alternate title, Sobobeños estan acostumbrados a todas estas cosas: y porque no? (The Soboba People Are Used to These Foods: And Why Not? 1895b). Johnston’s husband, Hancock McClung, an East Los Angeles developer, also owned a ranch in the San Jacinto mountains, where the couple met Jackson during her 1883 trip to the area (History of Hemet n.d.). Hal Eaton (2021), Johnston’s great nephew, however, disclaimed any knowledge of the recipes’ authenticity, recalling that at least in Los Angeles the family “typically had Chinese cooks at home.” The recipe was nevertheless copied widely, appearing in the Everyday Housekeeping magazine (1898) as well as in Mrs. Lincoln’s Boston Cookbook (1901), both credited to Johnston. The confection was also sold alongside other regional treats with names such as “Panocha Cream Candy” at Townsend’s in San Francisco and Cream Penuche at O.K. Candy Story of Berkeley (“Panocha cream candy at Townsend's” 1894; “The Most Delicious” 1899). Hale’s of San Francisco specified the addition of nuts to its “home-made panoche” (“Hale’s Good Goods” 1904).

Yet even as Anglo Californians sought to claim panochita as a regional specialty, fudge made with cheap industrial sugar and chocolate had begun to spread from the eastern United States. Stavely and Fitzgerald (2015: 287; see also Benning 1990) point, perhaps prematurely, to an “1880s fad among elite American women’s colleges, especially Vassar, Wellesley, and Smith.” For example, a student magazine, the Vassar Miscellany (1895: 397), published a “Song of the Fudge Pan.” Certainly by the 1890s fudge had begun to appear widely in New England regional cookbooks, often in varieties such as Vassar Fudge, Chocolate Fudge, Walnut Fudge, and Maple Fudge (The Puritan Cookbook 1898; A Book for the Cook 1899). The candy had reached Wisconsin by 1896, as a Mrs. Fowler (1896: 11) noted: “Quite the most fashionable candy of the present moment is fudges. It is not only desirable because it is new, but has several other recommendations to popularity. It is easy to make them successfully, which is quite a point with the amateur and they certainly are delicious eating.” Like Johnston’s recipe for panochita, these fudge recipes typically called for greater quantities of sugar than milk, which made the preparation easier in dormitories. The inclusion of maple fudge, sometimes with the maple sugar extended by the addition of granulated sugar, suggests that the northeastern version recipe may be related to a Québécois candy known as sucre à la crème, which has been traced to the early nineteenth century (Altan, Charbonneau, and de Valicourt 2021). Recipes for “Penouchy” and celebrations serving “fudge and penuci” appeared, but their rarity makes it unlikely that the fudge fad was launched from Mexico (The Ann Arbor Cookbook 1899: 241; The Republican Journal 1898: 1). Nevertheless, panocha was soon incorporated into the industrial melting pot of American food by the maple producer Log Cabin, which sold a Penoche Syrup in the first decade of the twentieth century (Figure 5) (Thomas 2022).

Paleontologists examining the influence of food choices on primate evolution have defined humans as animals that cook (Wrangham 2009), and creativity in the kitchen remains a hallmark of our species. When new food sources become available, cooks devise recipes for using them, adapting their existing cultural toolbox of culinary technologies and flavor principles, as Rozin and Rozin (1981) termed culturally encoded taste preferences. A primordial version of fudge called panochita de leche was created in New Spain, likely in the eighteenth century by sugar makers, candy vendors, and home cooks, using the simplest of available ingredients, rustic sugar and milk. The properties of sugar at different temperatures (now codified as stages), the effects of whisking to induce crystallization, and the smoothness produced by interstitial milk fat globules were all part of the vernacular knowledge of colonial kitchens that contributed to the dish’s development. Eighteenth-century manuscripts provide a sort of fossil record, albeit incomplete, of panochita’s evolution from Iberian candied fruits and nuts to the published recipes of the nineteenth century. This was probably not the invention of some European master confectioner, for a similar version emerged around the same time on the frontiers of Lower Canada, using maple syrup in place of brown sugar, although the recipe remained unknown in Europe itself.

Despite its popularity, the candy retained a measure of disapproval, perhaps as a result of plebeian origins and street vendor sales. Recipes that appeared in published cookbooks often substituted refined, white sugar for brown and bore more European-sounding names such as bocadillos and jamoncillos. The unrefined sugar itself also became known more generally as piloncillo. By the end of the nineteenth century, the term panocha had acquired a vulgar association with female genitals, as Feliz Ramos i Duarte (1895: 387) recorded in his Diccionario de mejicanismos, but it is not clear whether this term derived from the original meaning of a sprig of wheat, from the purported sweetness of the sexual act, or something else entirely. That meaning had spread by the 1940s as far as Los Angeles’ pachuco culture of disaffected youth (Blanco Sánchez 1971: 570). Indeed, readers of this article who conducted an internet search for “panochita” may already have been carried into the pornographic realms of the world wide web—to their dismay. Recipes continued to appear in mid-twentieth-century Mexican cookbooks, especially in the provinces (Castañeda 1938: 109–10; Díez de Pérez 1944: 140, 168, 169; Molinar 1981: 178, 173; Velázquez de León 1946: 76).

The most common dessert sold by vendors on the streets of Mexico City is flavored jello, but intrepid travelers can still find panochita in the fabled Porfirian-era temple of confectionery, the Dulceria de Celaya (Celaya Candyshop). Located on Cinco de Mayo Avenue, a few blocks from the National Palace in the Central Historic District, the shop specializes in traditional candies, including four different varieties: white (blancas), burnt (quemadas), vanilla, and liquor (envinadas) (Figure 6). They are labeled especiales (specialties), but old timers still occasionally ask for them as panochitas. Three different nut varieties, almond, walnut, and pine nut, are called “aleluyas” (hallelujahs). Although the convenience of industrial processed substitutes have largely replaced the labor-intensive recipe, Mexican afficionados have kept the tradition alive.

The authors wish to thank Hal Eaton, Maria de los Angeles Magaña, Victor Macías González, Ishita Dey, and Marta Manzanares Mileo for various discussions. Kelsey Kilgore helped to reproduce the recipes in the Culinaria Kitchen Laboratory, and Ariadna Pauliuc assisted with field work in Mexico City. PC acknowledges support from National Science Foundation, Grant No. DMR-1749374.