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Chocolate Cream Drops
Two cups granulated sugar, one-half cup milk; put them in a sauce pan and heat until it boils, then boil hard for five minutes, set the pan in a dish of cold water, stir until the mixture creams and cools enough to handle them, mould into small drops, laying them on a buttered platter, flavor as you wish; take one-half cake baker's chocolate, grate fine, put in a bowl and set in the top of a steaming kettle until dissolved, then take the creams one at a time and drop in the chocolate, roll over quickly, take out with a fork and slip on a buttered platter. Be careful not to let the chocolate cook or it will harden.
This is a plain boiled fondant, hand-rolled and dipped — the whole thing turns on sugar temperature and on keeping the chocolate barely warm.
- The hinge: do not stir while it coolsThe instruction to set the pan in cold water and stir is the old shorthand, but fondant only turns smooth and white if it drops to about 110F before you agitate it. Stir a still-hot syrup and you get large crystals and a grainy, sandy drop.
- "Boil hard five minutes"Timing was often the only gauge in a home kitchen. Use a thermometer instead and take the syrup to 238F, the soft-ball stage; five minutes on a modern high-output burner in a thin pan can overshoot well past that and give you a candy too stiff to mould.
- Half a cake of baker's chocolateBaker's unsweetened chocolate was sold as a scored cake, so "half a cake" is imprecise, though a half-pound cake was the familiar size, which would make this about 4 oz. Four ounces of unsweetened chocolate will coat this quantity of centres; buy plain 100% cacao baking chocolate, not chips.
- The coating is bitterUnsweetened chocolate over a very sweet fondant centre was common in recipes of this kind and reads as harsh to many palates now. Semisweet or bittersweet chocolate melts much the same way over steam and tastes closer to what a modern eater expects of a chocolate cream.
- "Do not let the chocolate cook"The warning is about scorching and seizing. Keep the bowl over steam, not touching the water, keep the chocolate under about 115F, and let no drop of condensation fall in — water turns melted chocolate to a stiff paste immediately.
- FlavouringWork the flavouring in while kneading the cooled cream, not into the hot syrup, where it will largely boil off. A teaspoon of vanilla, or a few drops of peppermint or lemon oil, suits this quantity.
- Buttered platterParchment or a silicone mat does the job better and without greasing the underside of the sweets. Chill the moulded centres for twenty minutes before dipping; a firm, cold centre is far easier to roll out with a fork.
- YieldTwo cups of sugar makes roughly 30 to 40 small drops, depending how large you roll them. They keep about a week in a tin between layers of paper.
Boiled fondant of this kind became a home industry in late nineteenth-century America once granulated sugar was cheap and reliably fine-grained, and once Walter Baker & Company's cakes of unsweetened chocolate were widely sold in a form a cook could grate. Before that, dipped chocolates were largely thought of as confectioners' work; after, they were something a household could attempt. The double-boiler-by-improvisation, a bowl set over a steaming kettle, is the tell of a kitchen without dedicated equipment, and the repeated warning against letting the chocolate cook shows how often the attempt went wrong.