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Chocolate Peanut Clusters
Shell a quart of freshly-roasted peanuts and remove the skins. Drop the peanuts, one by one, into the centre of a dish of "Dot" Chocolate made ready for use; lift out onto oil cloth with a dipping fork (a wire fork comes for the purpose, but a silver oyster fork answers nicely) to make groups of three nuts,--two below, side by side, and one above and between the others.
A two-ingredient confection whose whole difficulty lies in the chocolate. Everything else is arrangement.
- "Dot" ChocolateA Walter Baker & Co. product: a sweetened chocolate sold for dipping, apparently in small drops, which is presumably the source of the name. Any good couverture or dipping chocolate stands in; the point is that it is already sweetened and meant to be melted and set again.
- "Made ready for use" is the hingeThe phrase stands in for tempering, which this page does not spell out. Melt to about 115F, cool to 88-90F for dark or 86-88F for milk, and hold it there while dipping. Chocolate melted carelessly and left to set will bloom grey and turn soft and chalky.
- A quart of peanutsAmbiguous as written. A quart of unshelled peanuts gives roughly 6 oz of kernels; a quart already shelled would be nearer 1 1/4 lb. Read alongside "shell a quart," the smaller figure is meant.
- SkinsRubbing warm roasted peanuts between the palms or in a clean towel takes the skins off; a bowl toss and a gentle blow carries the papery bits away. The skins are bitter and keep chocolate from adhering.
- Oil clothOilcloth was one of the common non-stick surfaces of the period. Parchment, a silicone mat or waxed paper does the same job now.
- The dipping forkThe oyster fork substitution still works. The nuts go in loose rather than as a preformed group, and the clusters are formed on the oilcloth as they come out, with just enough chocolate clinging to bind them.
- SettingLeave at cool room temperature, around 65F, until firm and glossy, roughly 20 to 30 minutes. Refrigeration sets them faster but risks condensation and dulled surfaces.
Choice Recipes was one of a long series of promotional booklets issued by Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, the oldest chocolate firm in the United States, and its contents were drawn from well-known cookery writers of the day, Maria Parloa and Janet McKenzie Hill among them. The recipes exist to sell Baker's own lines, which is why the instruction names a proprietary product, "Dot" chocolate, rather than describing what to buy. Hand-dipped chocolates were a popular domestic pursuit around 1900, with dipping forks and marble slabs sold for the purpose, and the careful specification of two nuts below and one above gives every piece the same look. Peanuts, cheap and increasingly abundant after the Civil War as a Southern field crop, were a mainstay of American candy-making.