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Chocolate Cream
Add to one quart of fresh cream or milk one ounce of the best chocolate; sweeten to the taste; stir well while boiling. Have ready the whites of six eggs beaten well; pour the chocolate over the beaten eggs; stir thoroughly and quickly; strain through a sieve. Flavor with vanilla. Serve cold.
A very lean chocolate cream by modern standards: one ounce of chocolate to a quart of liquid, thickened only by egg white. Expect a pourable, barely-set cream rather than a spoonable custard.
- The hinge: pour hot, stir fastThe boiling chocolate cream has to go into the whites in a thin stream while you whisk constantly, or the whites set in threads. The sieve at the end is not optional — it catches whatever does curdle.
- One ounce of chocolateChocolate of this period was commonly sold as a hard cake for grating, often unsweetened, which fits the recipe adding sugar separately. Use unsweetened baking chocolate, finely chopped. One ounce in a quart gives a pale, milky result; two to three ounces is closer to what a modern palate reads as chocolate.
- Sweeten to tasteFor a quart, start around 1/3 cup sugar dissolved in the hot cream and taste before adding the eggs — chilling mutes sweetness, so err slightly generous.
- Whites onlySix whites is roughly 180 g. The six yolks are yours to spend on custard or mayonnaise; the recipe itself says nothing about them.
- ConsistencyWith no yolks, gelatin or starch, this sets no firmer than a thin pouring cream. Serve it in glasses or cups as a cold drink-dessert rather than turning it out of a mould.
- Cream or milkThe recipe treats them as interchangeable. Whole milk gives a thin, drinkable cream; heavy cream gives something closer to a rich sauce. Half-and-half is the usual middle ground.
- VanillaAdd the extract after straining, once the mixture has stopped steaming, so the alcohol and aroma do not flash off.
- Chilling and yieldCover and refrigerate at least four hours. A quart serves six to eight in small glasses.
"Cream" in nineteenth-century cookery covers a wide family of sweet dishes — flavoured creams thickened with eggs, isinglass or gelatin, and sometimes barely thickened at all — and chocolate cream is among the oldest, appearing in English and American books long before the twentieth century. Its shape comes from the drinking-chocolate tradition: chocolate was bought as a hard unsweetened cake to be grated, boiled with milk and sugar, and mixed or milled until frothy, which is exactly what happens here before the whites go in. It is the kind of dish a household would have ranked as something other than everyday food — a company dessert built from ingredients a well-stocked kitchen already had.