Home › Recipes › Chocolate Creams 1
Chocolate Creams 1
White 1 egg, 1/2 tablespoon cold water, 1 lb. confectioner's sugar, 3/4 teaspoon vanilla, Walter Baker & Co.'s Dot Chocolate. Put egg, water and vanilla in a bowl, and beat until well blended; then add gradually, while stirring constantly, sugar. Make into small balls, drop on a slightly-buttered paper, and let stand one hour. Melt five ounces Walter Baker & Co.'s Dot Chocolate in saucepan placed over hot water, and beat one minute. Drop balls, separately, in chocolate, and when coated remove to slightly-buttered paper, using a two-tined fork or confectioner's dipper. It will be necessary to reheat chocolate during the dipping. Let stand in a cool, dry place to harden chocolate. If a small egg is used it will not take up all the sugar.
The centres here are an uncooked fondant bound with raw egg white, and nothing in the method ever heats them. That is the problem with the recipe, and it is not one that a change of timing fixes.
- The egg white is never cookedThe white is beaten with water and vanilla, thickened with sugar, rolled and left to stand at room temperature for an hour. At no point does it reach a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and dipping in melted chocolate — which is kept below body-warm to stay glossy — adds nothing.
- Sugar is not a safeguard hereConfectioners' sugar lowers water activity, but a soft dipping fondant of this kind still holds enough free moisture to support bacterial survival, and the centres are eaten within days rather than cured. Commercial makers who use egg white in cream centres generally specify pasteurised white.
- Chocolate coating is not a kill stepChocolate melted over hot water and kept workable sits somewhere in the region of 86-90F, nowhere near a pasteurising temperature. The shell seals the centre; it does not sterilise it.
- Who should not eat theseEven setting aside the general risk, uncooked-egg confectionery is specifically inadvisable for children, pregnant women, older adults and anyone immunocompromised. Use a current recipe for chocolate creams — modern versions build the centre on cooked fondant, condensed milk or pasteurised white.
- Dot ChocolateWalter Baker & Co.'s "Dot" was one of the firm's sweet chocolates, used here as a dipping or coating chocolate. It is long discontinued; the nearest equivalent in a shop today is a dark or milk couverture sold in callets.
- On the last sentence"If a small egg is used it will not take up all the sugar" is the period's way of admitting that a pound of sugar is a target, not a measurement. Fondant was worked by feel until it stopped taking sugar.
This comes from one of the recipe booklets Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, distributed to promote its cocoa and chocolate — a genre of advertising cookery that flourished from the 1880s through the 1920s and put brand names directly into the ingredient list. Home chocolate-dipping was a fashionable domestic craft in that period: confectioners' sugar is generally said to have become cheaper and finer by then, and manufacturers were selling coating chocolate in small quantities for exactly this purpose; the recipe itself mentions the two-tined dipping fork. The uncooked, egg-bound centre was the amateur's shortcut around boiled fondant, which demanded a sugar thermometer and a marble slab; it appears in a great many turn-of-the-century candy chapters, and its disappearance from modern books probably has less to do with taste than with what came to be understood about raw eggs.