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Chocolate Drops
Dissolve four ounces of the best French chocolate in a little boiling water, and add to it half a pound of sifted sugar; stir the mixture on the fire till it is smooth and quite hot. Place it in drops about the size of a sixpence on sheets of writing paper, and leave them until cold. If it is wished, the drops may be shaken (while still soft) in a paper with some pin-head comfits. They should be kept in layers between sheets of paper. Time, about half an hour. Probable cost, 7d. for this quantity.
This is a sugar-paste sweet rather than a moulded chocolate: the chocolate is thinned with water and bulked with twice its weight in sugar, so the result sets hard and matte, closer to a fondant drop than to anything tempered.
- The hinge: water, not milk or creamChocolate seizes when a few drops of liquid hit it, but recovers into a smooth paste once there is enough water present. Add the boiling water in one go and keep stirring over gentle heat; dribbling it in is what produces a grainy, curdled mass.
- "French chocolate"In Victorian usage this generally meant a chocolate sold in cake or block form, softer and less refined than modern couverture, and usually already sweetened. A dark chocolate around 55-60 per cent is a reasonable modern substitute; anything higher will need a little more water and will taste sharp against the half-pound of sugar.
- Sifted sugarNot granulated. This is caster or icing sugar passed through a sieve, which is why the mixture goes smooth on the stove instead of staying gritty. Icing sugar gives the most reliable result.
- Quantities and yieldFour ounces is about 115 g of chocolate to 225 g of sugar. The recipe gives no yield; how many drops you get depends entirely on how thickly they are laid down.
- The size of a sixpenceA Victorian sixpence was about 19 mm across, a little under three-quarters of an inch. Pipe or spoon the paste while it is hot and it will spread to about that width on its own.
- Writing paperSubstitute baking parchment or a silicone mat. Nineteenth-century writing paper was sized to take ink without feathering, which would have helped the drops release; modern printer paper is a poorer bet and they may stick.
- Pin-head comfitsTiny sugar spheres, sold today as nonpareils or hundreds and thousands. The instruction to shake them with the soft drops in a paper works, though scattering them over the piped drops is easier to control.
- StorageThe layers of paper are not decorative. These are hygroscopic and will weep and fuse in a humid kitchen; keep them airtight, interleaved, and eat within a week or two.
- The cost noteSevenpence for the batch is a period price, of no use as a guide now.
Cassell's places this among a run of home confectionery. Drinking chocolate had been a luxury in Britain since the seventeenth century, but eating chocolate in solid cake form only became widely available after the mid-nineteenth century, when improved pressing methods on the Continent and in Britain made a palatable solid bar possible; before that, "chocolate" in a cookbook nearly always meant something to be dissolved and drunk. The label "French chocolate" is often taken to reflect the reputation French makers were said to hold for fine eating chocolate at the time, and it is used here as a mark of quality rather than a specific product. The technique itself, dissolving the chocolate and stiffening it with a great deal of sifted sugar, belongs to the older sugar-boiling tradition of comfits and lozenges rather than to modern chocolate work, which is why the drops set by drying out on paper instead of by tempering.