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Chocolate Almonds
Blanch the almonds by pouring boiling water on them, and let them stand two or three minutes. Roast them in oven. Dip them in the following recipe for chocolate coating, and drop on paraffine paper. 1/2 pound cake of Walter Baker's Vanilla Sweet Chocolate, 2 level tablespoonfuls of butter, 2 tablespoonfuls of boiling water. Put chocolate in small saucepan over boiling water and when melted stir in butter and water. Mix well. If found to be too thick, add more water; if too thin, more chocolate.
A promotional confection from a chocolate company's recipe pamphlet. The coating is a quick butter-and-water ganache rather than tempered couverture, which changes how it behaves and how it keeps.
- The hinge: water and chocolateMelted chocolate seizes into a grainy paste if a few drops of water hit it, yet this recipe adds two tablespoons deliberately. The butter goes in alongside it, and the water is boiling, both of which help; add the liquid all at once and stir hard rather than drop by drop, which is the surest way to tighten it.
- Walter Baker's Vanilla Sweet ChocolateA sweetened dark eating chocolate, flavoured with vanilla; the exact cacao content is not recorded, and as a "sweet" chocolate it was likely sweeter than a modern semisweet bar. Half a pound is 8 oz; use a good semisweet bar rather than chips, which contain stabilisers that resist melting smoothly.
- BlanchingTwo or three minutes in boiling water is right for standing, but drain them and slip the skins off while still warm. Cooled almonds grip their skins.
- Roasting temperatureThe book assumes you know; 350F for 8-12 minutes, shaking the pan once, until they smell nutty and are pale gold inside. Let them cool completely before dipping or the coating will slide off.
- Paraffine paperWaxed paper, sold then in sheets for candy work. Parchment or a silicone mat is easier now and releases more cleanly.
- Melting vessel"Small saucepan over boiling water" is a double boiler improvised from what was on the stove. Keep the water at a bare simmer and do not let the pan bottom touch it; sweet chocolate scorches at low temperatures.
- Storage and appearanceBecause the chocolate is not tempered, the finished almonds will set soft and dull and may bloom grey within a day or two. They are meant to be eaten fresh; keep them cool but not in the refrigerator, where condensation will make them sticky.
This comes from one of the recipe booklets issued by Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, a chocolate firm whose mills date to the eighteenth century and which spent the late 1800s and early 1900s distributing free collections of recipes, each one calling for its own branded products by name. The booklets are often credited with helping shift chocolate in the home kitchen from a drink to a baking and confectionery ingredient. Chocolate-coated almonds themselves are much older than the pamphlet: sugar-panned almonds were a European banquet sweet for centuries, and coating them in chocolate rather than hard sugar became practical once conching and cheap sweet eating chocolate arrived in the nineteenth century. The butter-and-water coating here is a household shortcut around tempering, which was difficult to manage reliably without a marble slab and a thermometer.