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Candies and Candy Making: Bring
Chocolate-cream Candy. -Melt together in a double boiler ounce of chocolate scraped fine, 3 ounces of powdered loaf sugar, 1 pint of sweet cream. Bring these nearly to a boil but remove before they simmer and beat them up with an egg beater.
Let cool, adding the whites of 4 or 5 eggs. Again beat up the whole with an egg beater, remove the froth with a sieve, and serve in glasses decorated with the froth on top. Or dissolve in 6 glasses of fresh milk 1 ounce of grated chocolate and 3 ounces of white sugar. Beat up the yolks of 3 eggs and stir into these the milk and chocolate, stirring slowly one way. Add a few drops of vanilla boiled with milk. Mix well, place in cups in a pan of water, and boil for an hour. Serve cold.
Despite sitting in a candy chapter, neither of these is a candy: the first is a chilled chocolate cream served in glasses, the second a baked chocolate custard. The first version is the problem, and it is not a fixable one.
- Raw egg whites, never cookedThe cream mixture is deliberately taken off the heat before it simmers, cooled, and then four or five raw egg whites are beaten in and served straight from the glass. Nothing in the sequence brings the eggs to a temperature that would deal with Salmonella, and the froth spooned on top is pure uncooked white. Use a current recipe for chocolate mousse or pots de crème instead.
- The chocolate quantity is missingThe text reads "ounce of chocolate scraped fine" with no number, so the figure has dropped out somewhere between print and page. Compare the second version, which specifies 1 ounce of grated chocolate to 6 glasses of milk.
- Loaf sugarLoaf or lump sugar was refined sugar sold in a hard cone and broken up as needed; "powdered loaf sugar" means it has been pounded fine. Ordinary granulated or caster sugar is the equivalent.
- Sweet creamSimply cream that has not soured — the distinction mattered when milk was delivered daily and turned quickly. It does not indicate any added sugar.
- "Glasses" as a measureA "glass" was never standardised: depending on the writer it could mean anything from a wineglass to a tumbler, so six glasses might be a little over a pint or as much as three. The original offers nothing more precise, and the chocolate, sugar and egg quantities give no firm steer either.
- The chocolate itselfCooking chocolate of this period was usually unsweetened, coarse and high in cocoa butter, which is consistent with the heavy sugar in both versions. Modern unsweetened baking chocolate is the nearest thing; eating chocolate would throw the sweetness out entirely.
The placement of these two recipes among the candies says more about how loosely nineteenth-century compilers filed things than about the dishes themselves — "chocolate cream" covered everything from a fondant-filled bonbon to a drink to a spooned dessert, and a compiler working from clippings and older books could easily land a custard in the confectionery chapter. Both versions descend from the older European tradition in which chocolate was a beverage first and a confection second: the cup baked in a pan of water is the standard crème method, and the frothed, glass-served version echoes the whipped chocolate drinks of Spanish and French practice, where the foam raised with a beater or molinillo was the point of the exercise. Household books of this period are often said to have finished such mixtures with uncooked egg white for lightness, a habit that seems to have persisted well into the twentieth century and would be the reason so many of these recipes are now unusable as printed.