The guy on TV was surprised.

The guy on TV is the host of several cooking shows. He's British, so I think of him as Alistair Wordsworth-Shelleykeats, but that probably isn't his real name.

The shows he hosts are on something called Recipe.TV, which I have recently discovered after changing my cable provider.

Yes, I still have cable. I also have a landline. If it doesn't bother me, I don't see why it should bother you.

Anyway, Wordsworth-Shelleykeats has several shows on this channel, which tends to repeat them over and over again. He has at least two that are based in France, where he lives, one in England, where he is from and an occasional one in the United States, which appears to be the only place where Recipe.TV airs.

On an episode of the English show, he was taking the host of the channel's Irish-food show, Maureen Flaherty O'Shaughnessy (also probably not her real name) to his favorite spots in London. In Greenwich, he took her to a fudge shop.

He was surprised, he said. It turns out that fudge was not invented in England, as he had always assumed.

I wasn't surprised. It had never occurred to me that fudge was invented in England. It had never occurred to me that fudge was invented anywhere. If I had given it a moment's thought, I probably would have assumed fudge had existed since time immemorial. Like, maybe a dinosaur mixed together cocoa, butter, sugar and evaporated milk, and decided it would be a big hit at seaside resorts.

Or lakeside resorts, because Wordsworth-Shelleykeats confidently announced that fudge was actually invented on Mackinac Island.

That made sense to me. Mackinac Island, which is in Lake Huron between Michigan's Upper and Lower Peninsulas, is famous for its fudge. It even has a fudge festival every year.

Armed with this new information, I proudly related it to my relatives on a family Zoom call (my two cousins are Michiganders). "Fudge was invented on Mackinac Island," I said.

"No it wasn't," my cousins said. "Also, it's pronounced 'Mackinaw,' not 'Mackinac.'"

At this point, no one actually knows who invented fudge, or where, my cousins said. We only know that is is definitely American in origin and definitely not from Mackinac Island, no matter how it is pronounced.

My cousin Kim promoted the idea that it was created by a Vassar student, Emelyn Battersby Hartridge, who is definitely credited with making the first-known written reference to a recipe for it in a 1888 letter. After that, the college became a hotbed of fudge making for years.

For a long time, that recipe (2 cups sugar, 1 cup light cream, 2 ounces unsweetened chocolate, 1 tablespoon butter) was called Vassar Fudge.

However, a different legend speculates that fudge was actually invented two years earlier, in Baltimore — and on Valentine's Day, yet. In an origin story similar to the creation of toasted ravioli, it is said that an unknown Baltimore confectioner made a mistake while he was trying to make caramels, and ended up with smooth, rich, perfection.

In both the Vassar and the Baltimore versions, the result was called "fudge" because the creator, whoever it was, fudged the original recipe.

It turns out that the word "fudge," meaning "to mess something up" actually came before the invention of fudge. I always assumed it was the other way around, and that people said "fudge" as a way of avoiding saying something bad.

It turns out I was the one who was surprised.

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