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Cream, Whipped, with Chocolate
Make two ounces of best chocolate into a paste with a little boiling water. Mix it gradually and smoothly with one pint of cream, sweetened, and two tea-spoonfuls of dissolved gum arabic (if this is used see the previous recipe); boil and cool, then add the whites of three eggs beaten to a froth. Half fill the glasses, and whip the remainder into froth; fill them up, and keep in a cool place till wanted. Double cream is the best for this purpose. Probable cost, 2s. Sufficient for eight or ten glasses.
A late-Victorian chocolate whip that reads simply enough, but the method folds raw egg white into a cold sweetened cream that is then held "till wanted" — the one step that puts it out of reach today. The notes below explain the archaic language and why the dish fails on food-safety grounds.
- Why it cannot be made as writtenThe chocolate cream is boiled and cooled, and only then are three raw egg whites beaten in. Nothing afterwards brings the mixture to a temperature that would deal with Salmonella, and unlike a meringue or a boiled icing there is no hot syrup, no acid and no sugar concentration high enough to inhibit growth. Use a current recipe for chocolate mousse or chocolate whipped cream instead.
- "Keep in a cool place till wanted"In a Victorian house that meant a larder or ice-box of uncertain temperature, and the phrase carries no time limit. Filled glasses of raw-egg cream standing for hours is precisely the holding pattern modern practice rules out.
- Gum arabicAcacia gum, dissolved in water to a syrup, was used as a stabiliser to stop whipped cream weeping. It is still sold as a food additive, though a modern cook would reach for gelatine or simply serve the whip promptly. The recipe's cross-reference to "the previous recipe" for its preparation is lost once the page is read alone.
- "Best chocolate"In this period the word usually meant a sweetened chocolate cake or block for eating or drinking, softened to a paste with boiling water, rather than modern couverture or cocoa powder. Two ounces of such a sweetened chocolate would probably carry less cocoa solids than two ounces of modern dark chocolate.
- Double creamThe British double cream the book prefers runs about 48 per cent butterfat; American heavy cream at 36 per cent is thinner and whips to a softer, less stable froth. One pint here is a UK pint of 20 fl oz.
- Cost and yield"Probable cost, 2s." is two shillings, a housekeeping figure meant for comparing dishes rather than for us. The stated yield — eight to ten glasses — indicates small stemmed custard or sherry glasses, not tumblers.
Whipped creams flavoured with chocolate, coffee, ratafia or liqueur were a fixture of the Victorian supper table and ball buffet, served in little glasses. Cassell's dictionaries of cookery arrange such things alphabetically with a probable cost attached to each — a format aimed squarely at the middle-class housekeeper directing a cook rather than at a professional kitchen. The gum arabic is the period detail worth noticing: before reliable refrigeration and before powdered gelatine was cheap and standardised, stabilising a cream so it would stand up for an evening was a real problem, and confectioners borrowed the gums used in pastille and lozenge making to solve it.