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Chocolate Cream
Grate one ounce of the best chocolate and two ounces of sugar into a pint of thick cream; boil it, stirring it all the time, until quite smooth, then add, when cool, the whites of four eggs beaten to a solid froth. Half fill the glasses, and whip the remainder into a froth to put at the top. Time, twenty minutes. Probable cost, 2s., allowing 1s. 6d. per pint for the cream. Sufficient for a pint and a half of cream.
A Victorian cold chocolate cream, thickened not by gelatine or eggs cooked into a custard but by raw beaten whites folded into cooled cream. That last step is what puts it out of reach today.
- Why it fails: uncooked egg whiteThe whites of four eggs are beaten and folded into cream that has already been boiled and left to cool, then served straight from the glass. Nothing in the finished dish ever reaches a temperature that would deal with Salmonella, and the frothed topping sits at room temperature while it is whipped and served. Raw white carries a lower risk than raw yolk but it is not a safe process, particularly for children, older diners, pregnant women or anyone immunocompromised. Use a current recipe for chocolate cream or chocolate mousse.
- No holding instructionThe recipe gives no direction to chill, and none to serve promptly. A sweetened dairy base held warm or tepid is a good growth medium; the twenty minutes quoted is a preparation time and says nothing about how long the assembled glasses might stand.
- "The best chocolate" is not modern chocolateIn Victorian usage this meant a hard eating or drinking block, often coarsely ground and sometimes cut with starch or arrowroot, far less sweet and less finely conched than a modern couverture. An ounce of it to a pint of cream gives a much paler, milder result than an ounce of 70 per cent dark would.
- Thick cream"Thick cream" in an English book of this date means the richest cream available, closer to what is now sold as double cream than to American heavy cream at 36 per cent, though no fixed butterfat standard applied at the time. A pint here is the imperial pint of 20 fl oz, not the American 16.
- The arithmetic does not agreeThe method starts from a pint of cream but the closing line reads "Sufficient for a pint and a half of cream". Whether that is a slip or means the chocolate, sugar and whites would stretch to a pint and a half, the two figures do not match.
- The cost lineTwo shillings, with cream reckoned at 1s 6d the pint, is a period price note rather than an instruction. It is a useful reminder that cream, not chocolate, was the expensive part of the dish.
- "Glasses"Small stemmed custard or jelly glasses of a few fluid ounces each. A pint of cream lightened with whipped white would fill several of them.
Cassell's belongs to the great run of late nineteenth-century English household dictionaries, and its dessert chapters are full of "creams" — sweetened cream flavoured with chocolate, coffee, ratafia or fruit and set with isinglass, gelatine, or, as here, with nothing but beaten white and the body of the cream itself. Chocolate reached the English table first as a drink, and the drinking-chocolate blocks sold by grocers are the sort of thing a recipe like this calls for; only over the course of the century, as cocoa butter could be pressed out and eating chocolate manufactured on a large scale, did chocolate become an ordinary confectioner's ingredient rather than a luxury. The dish sits at the cheap end of the fashionable dessert: no mould, no turning out, no setting time, just glasses filled and topped with froth, which made it the sort of thing a cook could put up at short notice for supper. Its casual use of raw white is entirely of its period, before the bacteriology of egg-borne illness was understood.