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Two Eggs (Ounces of Chocolate)
Two ounces of Chocolate.
Two ounces of Butter.
Four ounces of Biscuit Crumbs.
Quarter of a teaspoonful of Allspice.
Three ounces of Castor Sugar.
Half an ounce of Cornflour.
Line the tartlet tins with pastry. Cream the yolks and sugar together; add the biscuit crumbs, grated chocolate, allspice, and cornflour. Melt the butter, whisk the whites of eggs, and add these to the mixture. Put a little of the mixture into each tartlet tin. Bake from twenty to twenty-five minutes. Ice with chocolate icing.
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A small chocolate tartlet filling, thickened with biscuit crumbs rather than flour. The title is an artefact of the book's layout: ingredient lists were set as headings, so "Two Eggs" and the two ounces of chocolate have been run together. The eggs are separated in the method, so read the list as two eggs plus the six items given.
- Oven heatNo temperature is stated. A moderate oven, 350F, suits twenty to twenty-five minutes for tartlets in shallow tins; the filling should be just set and no longer wet in the centre.
- The pastry is assumedThe recipe tells you to line tartlet tins but gives no pastry. About 8 oz of shortcrust or sweet pastry will line a twelve-hole tartlet tray, which is roughly what this quantity of filling covers.
- Biscuit crumbsBritish sense: crumbs from plain sweet biscuits, digestive or Marie, not American soda biscuits. Grind them fine, or the filling turns coarse.
- Castor sugar and cornflourCastor sugar is superfine sugar; cornflour is cornstarch. Half an ounce is roughly two level tablespoons; it presumably serves to bind the filling and keep the eggs from weeping.
- The chocolateBlock chocolate sold for cooking at this date was generally darker and less sweet than a modern eating bar. A 60-70% dark chocolate, grated on the fine side of a box grater so it melts into the mixture, is a reasonable modern substitute.
- Order of mixingMelt the butter and let it cool to barely warm before it goes in. Poured hot onto whisked whites it deflates them, and the filling bakes dense instead of light.
- AllspiceA quarter teaspoon across twelve tartlets is a background warmth, not a spiced flavour. Use ground allspice, not mixed spice, which contains cinnamon and cloves and will dominate the chocolate.
- Icing and yieldIce only once the tartlets are completely cold, or the chocolate icing slides. Expect about twelve small tartlets.
Chocolate tartlets of this kind belong to the late Victorian and Edwardian pastry repertoire, when solid eating and cooking chocolate had become cheap and reliable enough for household bakers to grate it into fillings rather than only drink it. The use of biscuit crumbs as the body of a sweet filling is characteristic of the period: crumbs bulked out an expensive flavouring, absorbed butter and egg, and gave a firmer cut than a custard, which mattered for a sweet meant to be iced and set out cold on a stand. The single warming spice, here allspice, is a survival of the older habit of pairing chocolate with spice, which is generally traced to the drinking chocolate of Spain and Mexico and lingered in English baking long after the drink itself had been sweetened and milked into something else.