Chocolate Icing
Take three tablets, or one-quarter of a pound of Menier's best chocolate, one cupful of milk, which you boil. Put in the chocolate to dissolve, stirring it gently for a quarter of an hour. Let it cool off and then apply to the cake.
A cooked chocolate glaze — just chocolate melted into boiled milk — that thickens as it cools into a pourable icing, not a fluffy buttercream.
- “Three tablets, or ¼ pound”Old eating-chocolate came in roughly 1 oz tablets, so this is 4 oz of chocolate; use a good semisweet or bittersweet bar.
- It’s a glaze, not a frostingMelted into milk and cooked, it stays thin and glossy, meant to be poured or spread over a cake, and it firms up as it cools.
- Low and slowStir gently over low heat the full quarter-hour so the milk reduces slightly and the chocolate melts smoothly without scorching.
- Let it cool before usingAs directed, cool it so it thickens to a spreadable consistency before applying to the cake.
- Sweeten if neededDepending on your chocolate, you may want to stir in a spoonful or two of sugar.
“Menier’s best chocolate” points to one of the giants of the age. The French house of Menier grew into one of the largest chocolate makers in the world, its riverside factory at Noisiel, outside Paris, a marvel of nineteenth-century industry, and its chocolate was exported everywhere in instantly recognizable yellow wrappers. That a Creole cook named Menier — as another recipe here names New York’s Maillard — reflects the cosmopolitan, Francophone pantry of New Orleans, stocked with the finest imported names. Any good dark chocolate serves in its place today.
From page 68 of the 1904 edition.
Original page from the book
