While there have been various chocolate candy recipes for a very long time, the recipe for simple fudge grew out of college dorms. Emelyn Battersby Hartridge, who claimed she got the recipe from a cousin, introduced fudge to Vassar College in 1888. The ingredients, sugar, butter, cream, and chocolate, were things that could be snuck out of the school cafeteria or sent as treats by a student's parents, and college students are pretty inventive in their cooking methods.
For this reason, early fudge recipes introduced it as “a college dish.” In 1897, the New York Tribune noted that it was best enjoyed “when a dozen or more girls are congregated in a room, sitting on sofa cushions spread out on the floor in a mystic circle around an alcohol stove, from which the odor of ‘fudge’ rises like incense.” Even for the modern college student cramming a contraband toaster into their closet ahead of an RA inspection, the idea of making fudge on an alcohol burner in a dorm room might seem perilous. But the young students didn’t care. In fact, an alcohol burner was on the staid side of things. Students often cooked over their wall- and ceiling-mounted gas lamps, and held pans full of molten fudge in the air to cool it.
Since women college students were under much stricter rules and curfews than male students, midnight fudge parties were a rebellion that scandalized administrators. Read about the early college fudge parties at Atlas Obscura.