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Fondant for Soft Chocolate Creams
2 1/2 cups of sugar, 1/3 a cup of pure corn syrup, 1 cup of water. Put the sugar, pure corn syrup and water over the fire and stir until boiling, then wash down the sides of the saucepan, cover and finish cooking as in making ordinary fondant. Let cook to 238 degree F. Turn the syrup onto a damp marble or platter and before it becomes cold turn to a cream with a wooden spatula. When the fondant begins to stiffen, scrape at once into a bowl and cover with a damp cloth, but do not let the cloth touch the fondant. Use this fondant in the following recipes.
A basic sugar fondant, softer than usual because of the corn syrup, meant as the interior for dipped chocolates. The whole thing turns on the thermometer reading and on not stirring the syrup once it boils.
- The hinge: no agitation while boilingStirring or jostling the pan after the sugar dissolves seeds premature crystals and gives grainy fondant. Stir only until it comes to a boil, then leave it alone until it reaches temperature.
- "Wash down the sides"Brush the inside wall of the pan with a wet pastry brush to dissolve stray sugar crystals, then cover for a few minutes so the trapped steam finishes the job. This is the whole reason for the lid.
- 238F is not optionalUse a calibrated digital or candy thermometer; a couple of degrees high gives a stiff, crumbly centre, a couple low gives a paste that will not hold its shape under chocolate. Check the thermometer in boiling water first and adjust for altitude, subtracting about 1F per 500 feet of elevation.
- Pure corn syrupThis means plain glucose corn syrup, close to the light corn syrup sold today and not high-fructose corn syrup for soft drinks; in period usage "pure" chiefly meant unblended with cane or refiner's syrup. It is an interfering agent that keeps the crystals fine, which is what makes this fondant "soft."
- Marble, or a substituteA marble slab pulls heat out fast and evenly. A chilled granite counter or an upturned rimmed sheet pan works; dampen it lightly so the syrup releases. Let the syrup cool undisturbed to roughly 110F before you begin working it.
- Working it"Turn to a cream" means scraping the mass from the edges to the centre repeatedly -- the recipe calls for a wooden spatula, though a stiff scraper or bench knife will do -- until it whitens and thickens, usually several minutes. Once it grips the tool, get it into the bowl immediately or it will set on the slab.
- Ripening and storageThe damp cloth over the bowl, held clear of the surface, prevents a crust. Fondant improves after a day or two of resting at room temperature; wrapped airtight it keeps for weeks and is rewarmed gently over hot water before flavouring and shaping.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; the ingredients work out to roughly 1 1/2 lb of fondant, enough for perhaps five or six dozen small centres depending on how they are shaped.
Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, one of the oldest chocolate firms in the United States, published Choice Recipes as advertising literature, gathering contributions from well-known cookery writers and domestic-science teachers of the day. Recipes like this one served a double purpose: they taught home confectionery at a moment when candy-making was a fashionable domestic accomplishment, and they kept the company's chocolate in front of the reader. Fondant itself is French in name and usually placed in mid-nineteenth-century France, though no origin is securely attributed; the word is the present participle of fondre, to melt, describing the texture in the mouth. The corn syrup here is the American contribution he United States from the 1870s and 1880s, with branded corn syrup for household use dating from about 1902 — and it is what separates a workaday supermarket-style cream centre from the firmer, all-sugar fondant used for petits fours.