Page through older cookbooks and you'll note lots of candy recipes — nougat and caramel and fondant and even homemade marshmallows — evidence that candymaking was a much more common home art in the days when people ate most of their meals at their own dining room table, and there was someone who stayed home to do the cooking.

Store-bought candy was considered an indulgence then; homemade candy was a mark of a cook's skill and generosity.

All of this means that your grandma probably knew a lot more about candymaking than you do.

So if you're thinking on whipping up some homemade fudge for the first time, you will need a little Fudge 101 first. To begin, there are two kinds of fudge: real candy and the marshmallow family. Here's an introduction:

Fudge candy

All you probably need to know about making a true candy fudge is that it took four full pages in "Anita Pritchard's Complete Candy Cookbook" (Harmony, 1978) to explain how to do it.

Even the queen of chocolate, Maida Heatter, calls candy fudge "temperamental and tricky to make."

Candy fudge is prone to two problems: crystallizing, which creates a distasteful grainy texture, and failing to set, which means you end up with a pan of frosting.

In this technique, sugar, cream and chocolate is boiled to 238 degrees, butter is added, it's allowed to cool and then the candy is beaten hard. The candy must be very deliberately handled, following arcane rules. And it can't be made in hot, humid weather (Problem A for Hawai'i candymakers).

This was the way everyone made fudge in the days before Carnation Condensed Milk, Kraft Marshmallow Creme and refrigerators, but it wasn't unusual to have to throw out every other batch.

There is a reason to learn how to make fudge this way: It's really, really good, silken textured and mouth-melting. But that's probably not enough incentive unless you've a purist with a lot of time on your hands and a steely determination in the face of failure.

So welcome to the ...

Marshmallow family

This school of fudge-making is said to have gotten its start with See's Candies, which used marshmallows to make a very popular, smooth-textured fudge, which they marketed as having a "secret ingredient."

That recipe escaped somehow and began to circulate under a variety of names — Million-dollar Fudge, Foolproof Fudge, Rainy Day Fudge. The people who made marshmallows and marshmallow fluff got into the act and started putting a fudge recipe on the jar.

The canned cream people — who had been circulating fudge recipes since the 1930s, but without the marshmallow creme — began teaching homemakers this style of fudge, too.

Marshmallow fudge involves boiling canned cream, butter and sugar for five minutes, stirring in chocolate chips and marshmallow bits or creme, adding nuts and flavorings, pouring the candy into a buttered dish and calling it a day. No soft ball stage, no candy thermometer, no worries about crystallizing. A batch can be ready, from cupboard to dish, in 35 minutes.

T.P. Skaarup, whose copyrighted fudge Web page(http://homepages.skylink.net/~skaarup/pages_fudge/ fudge_01_index.html) is a treasure trove of marshmallow family recipes, says the recipes as they're printed on the jars and circulated in many cookbooks have one flaw, however: They don't set very well and so have to be refrigerated and brought out just before serving. And he's right: Fudge won't "candy" unless it's boiled a good, long time.

Skaarup has spent years developing a technique that gets around this problem, but it puts you squarely back in candy-making territory, with a thermometer required.

He also offers an easier version in which the marshmallow cream is boiled together with the sugar and butter.

Researching fudge, you'll find that, in this regard if in few others, home cooks of the '40s and '50s were much more adventurous than cooks today. They made an almost infinite variety of fudges, not only with various nuts but with candied fruit, coconut and orange zest, and, omitting the chocolate, created various "white fudge" variations with maple syrup, flavored extracts and liqueurs, cream cheese and peanut butter. (Today's variations make use of butterscotch chips, mint chips and white chocolate chips.) Penuche, fudge cousin made with brown sugar, was a popular option. Bridge-club ladies layered chocolate and white fudges.