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Chocolate Biscuit
Yolks 4 eggs, 1/2 cup powdered sugar, 1 ounce melted Walter Baker & Co.'s Premium No. 1 Chocolate. Whites 4 eggs, 3/4 cup flour, Few grains salt. Beat egg yolks until thick and add gradually, while beating constantly, the sugar. Cut and fold in chocolate, then flour mixed with salt, and lastly whites of eggs beaten until stiff. If the ingredients are stirred in rather than cut and folded in, the results will not be as satisfactory. Drop by teaspoons, one inch apart, on a paper brushed over with clarified butter, then dredge with powdered sugar and place on a tin sheet; then sift over cakes powdered sugar.
Bake in a slow oven fifteen minutes. The mixture may be shapped same as lady fingers if preferred.
A flourless-in-spirit sponge batter in the ladyfinger family, leavened entirely by beaten eggs. Nearly everything depends on how the batter is combined.
- Fold, do not stirThe recipe says so twice and it is the hinge. The only lift comes from air beaten into the yolks and whites; a stirring motion collapses it and you get flat, leathery discs. Use a spatula and cut down through the middle, sweep along the bowl, and turn over, rotating the bowl as you go.
- Slow ovenThe recipe gives no temperature; a slow oven of this period is generally taken as somewhere around 300-325F. These want to dry and set rather than brown; fifteen minutes suits teaspoon-sized drops, a few minutes more if you pipe them into ladyfinger shapes.
- Premium No. 1 ChocolateWalter Baker's unsweetened baking chocolate, essentially pure chocolate liquor with no added sugar. One ounce of any modern unsweetened baking chocolate is the direct equivalent. Melt it gently and let it cool to barely warm before folding, or it will seize the egg foam.
- Powdered sugarIn American books of this period the term usually meant finely ground granulated sugar rather than modern confectioners' sugar, which is finer still and cut with cornstarch; either will work here. Half a cup in the batter is not much for four eggs; these are restrained, with more of the sweetness coming from the sugar sifted over the top.
- Paper and clarified butterParchment does the job without buttering. If you use clarified butter as written, brush it thinly; ordinary butter contains water and milk solids that will scorch at the edges even in a slow oven.
- The double dredgingThe drops are dredged with powdered sugar before going onto the tin sheet and sifted over with sugar again, so the repetition in the text is deliberate rather than a slip.
- YieldThe recipe gives none; expect roughly three dozen teaspoon-sized biscuits, fewer if piped into fingers. They stale quickly; store airtight, or dry them further in a low oven for use in trifles and charlottes.
Biscuit here is the French word, not the American one: a light egg-foam sponge, dry-baked, the same family that produces the ladyfinger the recipe offers as an alternative shape. Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, was a chocolate mill whose origins reach back to the 1760s and which by the turn of the twentieth century was among the best-known chocolate names in the United States. Its Choice Recipes pamphlets were promotional, distributed to push branded chocolate and cocoa into home baking, and drew on cooking-school teachers of the day, Maria Parloa among them.