Home › Recipes › Chocolate Cream
Chocolate Cream
3/4 box gelatine, or 3 tablespoons granulated gelatine, 1 cup cold water, 1 quart milk, 2 ounces Walter Baker & Co.'s Premium 1/4 cup sugar, 2 tablespoons boiling water, 1/4 teaspoon salt, Yolks 2 eggs, 1/2 cup sugar, 2 teaspoons vanilla. No. 1 Chocolate, Soak gelatine in cold water twenty minutes. Scald milk. Melt chocolate over hot water, add sugar, boiling water and salt. Stir until smooth and add to milk. Beat egg yolks until thick, and add gradually, while beating constantly, one-half cup sugar. Add gradually to hot mixture, and cook until mixture thickens; then add gelatine and vanilla. Strain into mould first dipped in cold water, chill, and serve with sugar and cream.
A moulded chocolate custard set with gelatine — what a later generation would call a Bavarian cream. The whole dish turns on cooking the custard to the point of thickening without letting it curdle.
- The hinge: custard temperatureThe yolk mixture thickens at about 170-175F and scrambles not far above that. Cook it over low heat or in a double boiler, stirring constantly, and pull it the moment it coats the back of a spoon. The straining step at the end is there to catch the strands if you overshoot.
- Gelatine quantitiesA "box" was the old 1-ounce carton, so three-quarters of one is about 3 tablespoons — the same as the alternative given. That equals roughly three 1/4-ounce envelopes of modern powdered gelatine, a firm set intended for turning out of a mould rather than spooning from a dish.
- Soaking waterA full cup of cold water to bloom the gelatine is generous by current practice; the granules take up what they need and the rest goes into the custard, thinning it slightly. Twenty minutes is right, and the swollen gelatine should be stirred into the hot custard off the heat until no grains remain.
- Premium No. 1 ChocolateWalter Baker's Premium No. 1 was plain unsweetened chocolate. Use 2 ounces of any unsweetened baking chocolate; do not substitute semisweet or the two separate sugar additions will make it cloying.
- Scalding the milkScalded means heated to about 180F, when it steams and shows a ring of small bubbles at the edge — not boiled. It shortens the custard cooking and helps the chocolate mixture disperse smoothly.
- The mouldRinsing the mould in cold water and leaving it wet is what lets the cream slip out; do not dry or grease it. A 1 1/2-quart mould or a loaf pan will hold this. To unmould, dip briefly in warm water and invert.
- ChillingNo time is given. Allow at least four hours, and overnight is better — gelatine continues to firm for several hours after it appears set.
- Yield and servingAbout 1 1/2 quarts, serving eight. "Sugar and cream" means plain cold heavy or light cream poured over at the table with sugar passed separately, not a whipped topping.
Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts grew out of a chocolate mill started on the Neponset River in 1765 by Hannon and Baker, though the firm itself dated its founding to 1780, when James Baker began making chocolate under his own name; by the turn of the twentieth century it was the best-known chocolate house in the United States. Its Choice Recipes booklets were promotional literature of the most respectable kind, drawing on contributions from the cooking-school authorities of the day — Fannie Merritt Farmer, Maria Parloa and Janet McKenzie Hill among them — and the recipes generally named a specific Baker product. This one is a chocolate Bavarian cream in all but name, a dessert the American cooking schools had adopted from French pastry practice: a stirred custard lightened or set and turned out of a decorative mould. Gelatine desserts of this kind became household staples only after granulated gelatine made the older business of clarifying calf's-foot stock unnecessary; the recipe gives the box and the tablespoon measure side by side, two ways of measuring the same packaged product.