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Chocolate Moss
Take a quarter pound of baker's chocolate, one pint of boiling water, one teaspoonful of corn starch dissolved in half a teacup of cold water, and half a pound of granulated sugar; put all together into a farina kettle and boil until thick. When this is cold, beat the whites of three eggs very light and stir in with the chocolate mixture, flavor with vanilla; line individual glass dishes with sponge cake or lady fingers and pour the moss over these. If preferred it can be placed in one large glass dish. It is very delicious.
The chocolate base here is cooked, but the egg whites are not: they are beaten raw and stirred into a mixture that has already gone cold, then served without further heat. That is the problem with the recipe, and no amount of care with the chocolate changes it.
- Raw egg white is the whole issueThree whites go into a cold chocolate custard and are never heated again. Salmonella can be present in the white as well as the yolk, and a cold, sweet, moist dessert that then sits in a dish is a hospitable place for it. Anyone cooking for children, older people, pregnant women or anyone immunocompromised should use a current mousse recipe instead.
- Cooling before folding makes it worseThe instruction to wait until the chocolate is cold is there so the whites keep their volume, but it also guarantees the eggs never reach a temperature that would matter. A hot base poured over whipped whites would not be safe either, but this version does not even attempt it.
- Farina kettleA double boiler — an inner pan set over a lower pan of simmering water, sold for cooking cereals. "Boil until thick" over water means a slow thickening, not a rolling boil, which is why the cornstarch is there to do the work.
- Baker's chocolateUnsweetened chocolate, sold plain for baking rather than as sweetened eating chocolate, which is why half a pound of sugar goes in alongside it.
- "Moss"Almost certainly a compositor's slip or a period spelling for mousse; nothing about the method involves Irish moss or carrageen, which was the other thing a nineteenth-century cook might have meant by the word in a dessert.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. A pint of liquid plus sugar and three whites would fill several small glass dishes once the sponge cake is allowed for.
Chocolate desserts set with cornstarch and lightened with beaten whites are generally associated with the second half of the nineteenth century, boxed cornstarch having been commercially available from around the middle of the century, and cooks began using it in place of the arrowroot, isinglass or gelatine that earlier receipts called for. The habit of lining a glass dish with sponge cake or lady fingers and pouring a soft cream over it comes down from the English trifle and charlotte russe. The raw-white finish was entirely ordinary then. The connection between eggs and salmonellosis was not established until well into the twentieth century, so a cook of this era saw nothing in the final step but a way to make the chocolate light.