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Chocolate Cannelons
Mix two ounces of grated chocolate with four ounces of finely-sifted sugar and a dessert-spoonful of flour, and add the beaten white of an egg to make a paste. Take pieces about the size of a walnut, and roll them out very thinly, place them on a buttered tin, and bake them in a moderate oven for ten or fifteen minutes. While they are warm, turn them over a ruler to shape them, and slip them on a sieve to dry. Probable cost, 5d. for this quantity. Sufficient for a small dessert-dish.
A stiff chocolate paste baked into thin wafers and curled while hot — closer to a tuile than to the savoury cannelons of forcemeat elsewhere in Cassell's. The whole thing hinges on shaping them in the few seconds before they set.
- Work fast off the ovenThe wafers are pliable only while hot. Bake in small batches of four or five, and curl each one over the ruler the moment it can be lifted; if a batch stiffens, ten seconds back in the oven will soften it again.
- Moderate ovenBy modern convention roughly 350F/175C; the book gives no temperature. These are thin and sugary, so although the recipe allows ten to fifteen minutes, start checking earlier — the edges darken well before the centres look done, and burnt chocolate is unmistakable.
- The chocolateVictorian "grated chocolate" means a hard block of plain eating or cooking chocolate, coarser in texture than modern couverture and variable in sweetness from one maker to the next. A plain chocolate around 60-70% grated finely on a microplane is a reasonable modern stand-in; chips or chopped pieces will not disperse into the paste.
- Finely-sifted sugarIcing sugar, or the finest caster you have, sifted. Granulated leaves the wafers sandy and makes them spread unevenly.
- One egg white, added by degreesTwo ounces chocolate and four of sugar will not always take a whole white. Beat it to a loose froth and add it a teaspoon at a time until the mixture just coheres as a stiff paste — too much and it becomes a batter that runs on the tin.
- Rolling them thinlyThe paste is sticky. Roll each walnut-sized piece between two sheets of baking parchment to something near the thickness of a coin, peel off the top sheet, and bake on the lower one rather than on the buttered tin the recipe calls for.
- The ruler and the sieveAny smooth cylinder does the work — a rolling pin, a wooden spoon handle for tighter curls. The sieve is simply a wire rack; it lets air reach both faces so the wafers crisp rather than soften.
- Yield and keepingPerhaps ten to a dozen wafers, enough for the "small dessert-dish" described. They go limp in a damp kitchen within hours, so store airtight the moment they are cold, and make them the same day they are served.
- The costing"Probable cost, 5d." is a late-Victorian household price with no modern equivalent worth calculating; the formula appears throughout Cassell's, presumably as a guide to what a dish ought to cost the household.
Cannelon comes from the French for a small pipe or tube, and in nineteenth-century English kitchens it covered anything rolled into that shape — Cassell's uses the same word for rolled forcemeat and for puff-paste tubes filled with jam. This chocolate version belongs to the family of thin curled wafers that pastry cooks kept for dessert service: the same trick of baking a sugar paste flat and bending it while warm produces the French tuile and the brandy snap. Chocolate as a baking ingredient rather than a drink became more practical in Britain from the middle of the century, as cocoa presses and cheaper sugar made hard eating chocolate more widely available — which is why a late-Victorian book can spend two ounces of it on a small dessert-dish and quote the cost at fivepence.