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Chocolate Dropped Cakes
To one-fourth pound of confectioners' sugar add one-third cup grated chocolate and the well-beaten whites of three eggs; beat all well together. Drop in teaspoons on buttered tins and bake in a slow oven.
— Mrs. Celia S. Chadwick
This is a chocolate meringue drop, and it stands or falls on the egg whites. Everything else is a matter of translating a few nineteenth-century measures.
- The hinge: fold, don't beatThe instruction to "beat all well together" will knock the air out of the whites if taken literally. Beat the whites to stiff, glossy peaks, beat in the sugar a spoonful at a time, then fold the chocolate through with a spatula until just streak-free.
- A quarter pound of confectioners' sugarAbout one cup, lightly spooned and levelled. Period confectioners' sugar may well have been coarser than today's 10X; modern powdered sugar contains cornstarch, which is harmless here.
- Grated chocolateThis most likely means a hard block of plain unsweetened chocolate, grated on a fine grater, though sweetened bar chocolate was also on sale. One-third cup grated is roughly 1 to 1.5 oz. Unsweetened baking chocolate is the closest match; grate it cold so it stays powdery rather than smearing.
- A slow ovenConventionally reckoned somewhere around 275-325F; the recipe itself gives no figure. For meringues the lower end is safer, since the aim is to dry them out rather than colour them. Reckon on 25 to 35 minutes, until the drops lift cleanly from the sheet.
- Buttered tinsButter encourages meringue to spread and then weld itself to the pan. Parchment on a flat baking sheet gives a far better result and releases without a fight.
- YieldThree whites' worth of batter makes roughly two dozen teaspoon-sized drops. They keep about a week in an airtight tin and turn sticky in humid weather.
Meringue drops of this kind ran through American community cookbooks from the 1870s onward under a dozen names — kisses, drop cakes, chocolate puffs — and they earned their place because they used up whites left over from custards, puddings and boiled dressings, which called for yolks alone. The economy is the point: a quarter pound of sugar, a little grated chocolate and three whites that would otherwise have been thrown out. That grated chocolate is itself a marker of the period. Bar chocolate for baking was sold unsweetened and unsoftened, and grating it by hand was the ordinary way to prepare it, decades before chips or melting wafers.