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Chocolate Cream
Grate 1 ounce of the best chocolate and 2 ounces of sugar into a pint of thick cream; boil it, stirring it all the time, until quite smooth; then add, when cool, the whites of 4 eggs beaten to a solid froth. Half fill the glasses, and whip the remainder into a froth to put at the top. Time, twenty minutes. The white of 1 egg should be allowed for every pint of good, thick cream. If this cannot be procured, more eggs must be used. A good-looking dish may be made by boiling a quart of milk down to a pint, and mixing with it the whites of 3 eggs. Sweeten and flavor the cream before using it. For a plain whipped cream, this is done by rubbing the rind of a lemon upon 3 ounces of loaf sugar, and pounding it in a mortar, then mixing it with a glass of sherry or half a glass of brandy, the white of an egg beaten to a solid froth, and afterwards with the cream. Whip it to a froth with a scrupulously clean osier whisk. As it rises, take it off by tablespoonfuls, and put it on a sieve to drain. It is a good plan to whip the cream the day before it is wanted, as it is so much firmer. It should be made in a cool place, and kept in the same. It may be served in a variety of ways, either in glasses or in a glass dish, when it should be prettily garnished, or surrounded by sponge cake, macaroons, or ratafias. A sponge cake may be made in the shape of a hollow cylinder, and filled with as much whipped cream as it will hold. Its appearance is improved by coloring part of it before whipping it. Different fruit syrups are used for coloring and flavoring. Many persons dissolve a teaspoonful of powdered gum arabic in a little orange-flower water, and add this to the cream. It keeps the froth firmer. Dotted cream may be simply whipped by whisking it with a wire whisk until it thickens. If boiled too long it will turn.
A cold chocolate whip from the era when cream came unpasteurised from a nearby dairy and raw egg white was the standard stabiliser. The vocabulary and the equipment both need translating, but the fundamental problem is the eggs.
- Why this one fails todayThe boiled cream is cooled and then loaded with four raw egg whites, and the dish is served cold from the glass. Nothing in the method brings the egg to a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and the mixture then stands at room or cellar temperature — the recipe even suggests whipping it the day before. Use a current whipped-cream or chocolate-mousse recipe built on pasteurised whites or a cooked meringue instead.
- "The best chocolate"In this period the phrase generally means a plain, largely unsweetened block for grating; the closest modern equivalent is unsweetened baking chocolate, not cocoa powder and not eating chocolate. The ratio of one ounce of chocolate to two of sugar suggests the chocolate carried little sweetening of its own.
- Loaf sugarA hard cone or block of refined sugar, bought whole and broken up with sugar nippers. Rubbing a lemon rind against the loaf was a common way to capture the zest oils; three ounces is a little under half a cup once pounded.
- "Time, twenty minutes"Most likely the book's overall time for the dish rather than a baking time; nothing here is baked.
- Osier whiskA bundle of peeled willow twigs bound at one end — genuinely used for cream, because the many thin rods aerate well. A balloon whisk is the descendant.
- Gum arabic and orange-flower waterGum arabic (acacia gum) is still sold as a powder for confectionery and does stabilise foam; orange-flower water is stocked by Middle Eastern grocers, and here serves as flavouring.
- RatafiasSmall, hard, bitter-almond-flavoured macaroons, used here purely as a border. Amaretti are the nearest thing on a modern shelf.
Whipped cream desserts of this kind — sweetened, flavoured with wine or lemon, piled into stemmed glasses — belong to a tradition that includes the earlier English "snow" and "fool". The long digression on colouring with fruit syrups, filling hollow sponge cylinders and edging the dish with macaroons and ratafias reflects a conviction that a cold sweet was as much a piece of table decoration as a course, and that appearance justified real labour: whipping a pint of cream by hand with a willow whisk and skimming the froth off by the spoonful onto a sieve to drain. The insistence on "good, thick cream" and the fallback of boiling a quart of milk down to a pint are a reminder that dairy quality varied enormously from one supplier to the next, and that cooks were expected to judge and compensate rather than follow a fixed formula.