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Mrs. Salzbacher's Chocolate Hearts
Melt, by standing over hot water, three ounces of unsweetened chocolate; add a pound of sifted powdered sugar and mix thoroughly; work to a stiff yet pliable paste with the unbeaten whites of three eggs (or less), adding vanilla to flavor. If the paste seems too soft, add more sugar. Break off in small pieces and roll out about one-fourth of an inch thick, sprinkling the board and paste with granulated sugar instead of flour. Cut with a tiny heart-shaped cake cutter (any other small cake cutter will do), and place on pans oiled just enough to prevent sticking. Bake in a very moderate oven. When done, they will feel firm to the touch, a solid crust having formed over the top. They should be very light, and will loosen easily from the pan after being allowed to stand a moment to cool. The success of these cakes depends upon the oven, which should not be as cool as for meringue, nor quite so hot as for sponge cake. If properly made, they are very excellent and but little labor. Use the yolks for chocolate whips.--From "Good Housekeeping."
Not a dough at all but a rolled sugar-and-egg-white paste, closer to a baked royal icing than to a biscuit. There is no flour, no butter and nothing to raise it, so everything depends on the stiffness of the paste and on the oven.
- "Or less" is the real instructionA pound of sifted powdered sugar against three ounces of chocolate, brought together with the unbeaten whites of three eggs -- or fewer. Egg sizes vary and a pound of sugar is a target rather than a measurement, so add the whites a little at a time and stop when the paste rolls without cracking or sticking.
- Sugar on the board, never flourThe recipe is explicit, and it is right: flour would show as raw streaks and toughen the paste. Use granulated as written; powdered sugar cakes under the pin.
- The oven bracket is genuinely useful"Not as cool as for meringue, nor quite so hot as for sponge cake" is how you specified a temperature before thermostats. Meringue dries at 200 to 250F and a sponge bakes at 350 to 375F, which puts these at roughly 300 to 325F.
- How you know they are doneA solid crust formed over the top and firm to the touch, with the inside still soft. They are not meant to bake dry -- the recipe insists they should be "very light" -- and they firm further as they cool.
- Let them stand before you lift them"After being allowed to stand a moment to cool" is a real step. Lifted straight from the oven they tear; a minute on the pan and they release cleanly.
- The whites here are bakedWorth saying, because several of the uncooked confections elsewhere in this book are not. These go into an oven and come out with a set crust, so the raw-egg problem that applies to the Chocolate Whip and the Chocolate Charlotte does not apply here.
- About using up the yolksThe closing line sends you to the Chocolate Whip for the leftover yolks, and that recipe does use two of them. Read our note on that page first: as printed it folds five raw whites into a cold base and is not safe to make as written.
- SizeA tiny heart cutter means tiny -- an inch or so across, rolled a quarter of an inch thick. A pound of sugar makes a great many of them, so halve the quantities unless you are baking for a crowd.
The credit line reads "From Good Housekeeping", and that is the other supply line feeding a booklet like this one. Alongside the cooking-school names -- Bedford of the New York Cooking School, Ewing of Chautauqua and Purdue, Janet McKenzie Hill of the Boston Cooking School Magazine -- Walter Baker drew on the women's magazines, which by this date ran test kitchens of their own and were themselves in the business of vouching for products. The confection is an old one in a new shape: sugar worked to a pliable paste with egg white is the confectioner's pastillage, normally left to dry hard for ornamental work, and the innovation here is simply to bake it instead. Cutting it into hearts with a tiny tin cutter is the period's idea of a valentine or a party favour.