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Candies and Candy Making: Bonbons
Chocolate and Vanilla Cream Bonbons. - Strain through a piece of muslin 1 ounce of fine picked gum arabic, soaked in gill of hot water. Add a few drops essence of vanilla, and stir in as much icing sugar as it will take, working it into a stiff but soft and yielding paste. About 1 pound of sugar will be required.
Dissolve 2 ounces of French chocolate with a tablespoonful of water in an oven. Beat up the mixture, and work smooth, and add to it the white of 1 egg beaten as for icing.
Mold suitable drops of vanilla cream fondant; place these on a sheet of waxed paper or plain paper brushed with fine sugar, and let CANDIES AND CANDY MAKING stand until hard. Dip these creams in the chocolate coating in the usual way. - Almond Bonbons. Mold almond paste into any desired shape, and dip them into melted fondant. en.
Two confectioners' recipes of the gum-paste school, written for a reader who already knew how to temper and dip. The chocolate coating here is the problem: it contains raw egg white and is never heated to any temperature that would make it safe.
- The raw egg whiteThe coating is 2 ounces of chocolate loosened with a spoonful of water and melted in an oven, then beaten with the white of an egg "beaten as for icing", and used on cold fondant. The chocolate is warmed only enough to melt, so the egg is never brought anywhere near a safe temperature, and the coating is eaten as it sets. Shell eggs carry a real Salmonella risk in the white as well as the yolk; use a current recipe for chocolate coating instead.
- Water in chocolateEven setting the egg aside, a tablespoon of water beaten into 2 ounces of chocolate is liable to seize it into a grainy mass. What was sold as "French chocolate" in this period was generally a sweetened eating chocolate and would not have behaved like modern couverture.
- A gillA quarter of a pint: four fluid ounces (half a cup) by American measure, five by imperial. The original text appears to have lost a word — "soaked in gill of hot water" presumably should read a gill, though a smaller quantity may have been meant for so little gum.
- Gum arabicAcacia gum, still sold as a powder or in tears for confectionery and baking. It is a thickener and binder, not a setting agent like gelatine: soaked and strained through muslin it gives a sticky syrup that carries icing sugar into a pliable paste.
- Icing sugarConfectioners' or powdered sugar. About a pound of it goes into an ounce of gum and a little water, which tells you the paste is essentially sugar held together — this is gum paste fondant, not the boiled-syrup fondant made at the soft-ball stage.
- "Dissolve in an oven"Shorthand for gentle residual warmth rather than a heated oven; the book gives no temperature. A modern oven at any dialled setting is far too hot for chocolate.
- Almond bonbonsThe second recipe assumes marzipan or a confectioner's almond paste on hand, and "melted fondant" means poured fondant warmed to a dipping consistency, not caramelised sugar.
Gum paste offered a shortcut to a soft centre: soak, strain, knead in powdered sugar, and you have a workable paste without taking sugar to a boiled stage — useful to anyone without a sugar thermometer. The word bonbon is the French reduplication of bon, good, and in English it commonly came to mean a small dipped or coated sweet with a soft centre. "French chocolate" in a book like this looks more like a quality claim than a statement of origin, signalling a smooth eating chocolate rather than a coarse one. Recipes of this kind read as trade formulas with the tempering and thermometry left out, which is why the instructions end with the unhelpful phrase "in the usual way."