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Bonbons: Melt
A Combination of chocolate fondant and cocoanut is excellent. Melt a cupful of chocolate fondant and pour into a square or oblong box lined with paraffine paper. Melt a cup of pink or white fondant in a double boiler and stir in one-half cupful of cocoanut. Pour over the chocolate fondant. Snowballs can be made by taking one cupful of fondant and melting it, then stir in one-half cupful of grated cocoanut. Form into balls, roll in beaten egg white and then roll in grated cocoanut until thickly covered. Place on paraffine paper until they harden.
Cocoanut drops are made by mixing with two cupfuls of melted fondant one-half cupful of grated cocoanut and one-fourth cupful of finely chopped candied cherries. Add a teaspoonful of juice of maraschino cherries. Drop from a spoon on paraffine paper, and press a candied cherry in the center of each bonbon. NUT BONBONS Divide some fondant into four parts. Color one part pink, one part yellow, add to the third violet, and to a fourth green pistachio coloring. Flavor each portion with a different flavoring extract. Take some halved walnut meats and blanch. Form the fondant into round balls the size of hickory-nuts; put a half walnut on each side of the fondant ball and press them together so that the fondant is between the two halves of the walnuts. By using some chocolate fondant, some maple fondant and some white fondant you can have these bonbons in seven colors.
A set of fondant variations from the era when every home candy-maker kept a batch of cooked fondant ripening in a crock. Most of it translates directly, but the snowballs depend on a raw egg-white coating that is never cooked, and that step should not be reproduced.
- The raw egg whiteThe snowballs are rolled in beaten egg white and then in coconut, and simply left on paper to harden at room temperature. Nothing in that process brings the egg above room temperature, so any Salmonella present survives, and the sugary, moist coconut coating sits out while it dries. Use a current recipe if you want coconut snowballs.
- The rest of the pageThe layered chocolate-and-coconut slab, the coconut drops and the nut bonbons contain no egg and are ordinary sugar work. They are unaffected by the caution above.
- Paraffine paperWax paper, sold then as paraffine paper. Parchment is the better modern choice for anything you want to peel cleanly off set fondant.
- Melting fondantAlways over hot, not boiling, water, and stirred as little as possible. Heated too far -- confectionery guidance generally puts the limit somewhere around 140-150F -- fondant thins, loses its gloss and re-sets coarse and grainy; a few drops of hot water or sugar syrup loosen it more safely than more heat.
- CocoanutGrated coconut in this period was normally unsweetened, either fresh-grated or the dry shredded kind. Modern sweetened flake coconut is wetter and much sweeter, and will slacken melted fondant noticeably; reduce it slightly or dry it in a low oven first.
- Blanching walnutsWalnut halves were sometimes scalded to loosen the papery skin, which carries most of the bitterness. It is fiddly and rarely done now; good fresh walnut halves need only a light toast, and the fondant should be tacky enough to grip them.
- Ball sizeA hickory nut is roughly an inch or less across, so these are small centres.
- Colouring and flavour"Green pistachio colouring" is simply green food colour, not pistachio flavour. Extracts go in before the colour is fully worked through, and a scant quarter teaspoon per cup of fondant is plenty at this concentration.
- YieldA cup of fondant makes roughly two dozen small centres. The recipe gives no size for the box, so the number of squares cut from the layered slab depends entirely on what you pour it into.
Fondant was the backbone of American home candy-making from the 1880s through the 1920s: a batch of sugar, water and a little glucose or cream of tartar, boiled to the soft-ball stage, poured out on marble, worked with a scraper until it turned opaque, then kneaded and left to ripen for a day or more. Once you had it, the whole confectioner's repertoire opened up, and books like this one filled pages with variations rather than new base recipes. The coconut here reflects a genuine shift in the period, when desiccated coconut became a cheap pantry staple rather than a luxury requiring a hammer and a fresh nut. The maraschino cherry juice and the four pastel colours point to the same impulse behind the boxed-chocolate trade of the day: a home cook was expected to turn out something that looked as though it had come from a confectioner's window.