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Chocolate Creams II
2 cups sugar, 1/8 teaspoon cream of tartar, 1/2 teaspoon glycerine, 1/2 cup water, Walter Baker & Co.'s Dot Chocolate.
Put ingredients (except chocolate) in a smooth granite-ware saucepan; place on range, stir until sugar is melted, remove spoon, bring mixture to the boiling point, and let boil rapidly, without stirring, until mixture will form a jelly-like ball when tried in cold water.
Pour into bowl, set in pan of cold water, and, as mixture begins to cool, stir from sides of bowl, and, when cooled throughout, beat until white and creamy. Turn on a platter and knead until smooth. Put in bowl, cover with oiled paper to exclude air, that a crust may not form, and let stand twenty-four hours to ripen. Flavor with vanilla, shape into balls, and dip same as Chocolate Creams I. The mixture from which the centres are made is known as fondant, and constitutes the foundation of French candies.
This is a plain boiled fondant with a chocolate coating, and everything depends on two temperatures: the one you cook the syrup to, and the one you dip at.
- The hinge: cook to 238FThe hinge: soft-ball stage -- "a jelly-like ball when tried in cold water" is what is now called the soft-ball stage, somewhere around 234-240F on a candy thermometer (the recipe itself gives no reading). Boiled much beyond that and the fondant sets grainy and hard; stopped short of it and it never firms enough to roll.
- Do not stir after boiling beginsThe instruction to remove the spoon is not fussiness. A single sugar crystal dragged in from the pan wall seeds the whole batch coarse. Wash the sides down with a wet pastry brush once, then leave it alone.
- Granite-wareEnamelled steel, prized then for its smooth non-reactive surface. Any heavy stainless or enamelled pan does the same job; avoid a scratched or pitted interior.
- Glycerine and cream of tartarBoth are anti-crystallisers. The cream of tartar inverts a little of the sucrose during boiling; the glycerine holds moisture so the centres stay soft in the shell. Buy glycerine labelled food grade, not the pharmacy skin-care bottle.
- Dot ChocolateOne of Walter Baker & Co.'s proprietary chocolate lines; the recipe does not say what form or sweetness it took. Use unsweetened baking chocolate, or, for a coating that sets with any snap, tempered dark couverture.
- Cooling before beatingLet the syrup drop to about 110F undisturbed before you begin stirring. Beating it hot produces large crystals and a sandy texture; beating it lukewarm gives the fine grain that reads as creamy.
- The twenty-four hour ripeningReal and worth keeping. Resting lets moisture redistribute through the crystal mass, and fondant kneaded the next day is noticeably softer and easier to shape. Cover closely, as directed, or a dry crust forms.
- Dipping temperatureDark chocolate is generally worked at roughly 88-90F for dipping. Too warm and it will not set properly, drying dull or streaky; the centres themselves should be cool and firm before they go in.
- YieldTwo cups of sugar gives about a pound of fondant, which makes roughly 30 to 36 small centres depending on how you roll them.
Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, was the oldest chocolate concern in the United States, and its Choice Recipes booklets were advertising in the most useful form: free or near-free pamphlets that put the company's own products into the hands of home cooks, with contributions from well-known cookery writers of the day, Fannie Merritt Farmer and Maria Parloa among them. The closing line here does the real work of the page, telling the reader that fondant "constitutes the foundation of French candies" and thereby framing a simple boiled sugar paste as the entry point to a whole professional confectionery repertoire. French technique, here brought within reach of a household range and an enamelled saucepan. The insistence on ripening, on excluding air, and on a smooth pan all belong to that borrowed professional vocabulary.