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Candies and Candy Making: Chocolate-cream
CREAM CANDIES Chocolate Creams. - Mold French cream or any of the fondants into cone-shaped balls with the hands or fingers. Let them stand over night on waxed paper or a marble słab, or until they are thoroughly hardened.
If they are allowed to stand twentyfour hours or more all the better. Coating for Chocolate Creams.- Melt a cake of chocolate in a double boiler, but do not let it boil. When melted add a lump of paraffin as big as a small walnut, half as much butter, and a few drops of vanilla. Or melt in a double boiler a piece of paraffin the size of a hickory nut, a teaspoonful of lard, and add pound of chocolate. Stir until melted. If a thicker coat of chocolate is desired, add to the melted chocolate to thicken it a little glycerin or a few drops of linseed oil.
Do not attempt to thin dipping chocolate with water or else it will immediately grain and harden.
A turn-of-the-century dipping method that leans on two additives no longer considered food: linseed oil and, more marginally, paraffin. The centres are sound confectionery practice; the coating is not.
- Linseed oilLinseed oil sold today in hardware shops is a drying oil for wood and paint, and the common "boiled" grade carries metallic driers (cobalt, manganese, zirconium) that are toxic by mouth. The same oil pressed and handled as food is sold as flaxseed oil, but hardware-grade linseed oil is not food-grade and must not be eaten. This is the reason the recipe cannot be followed as written.
- GlycerinFood-grade glycerin exists, but glycerin is hygroscopic and pharmacy or craft grades are not interchangeable with it. Added to melted chocolate it thickens it by seizing it, which is the same failure the last sentence of the recipe warns about with water.
- ParaffinFood-grade paraffin was widely used in American home candy making through much of the twentieth century and is still sold as canning wax. It is indigestible rather than poisonous, but candle and craft paraffin may carry dyes, scents and other additives and is not food-grade, so it must not be substituted.
- "A cake of chocolate"A "cake" was not a fixed quantity: it usually meant a whole moulded block of unsweetened cooking chocolate, often around half a pound and scored into ounce squares, so the amount intended here is uncertain. Period chocolate also varied more in cocoa butter content than a modern bar, and these quantities are not transferable to current couverture.
- Why the additives were thereHome cooks of the period had little practical means of tempering unsweetened chocolate, so wax and extra fat were used to get a coating that set hard and glossy without tempering. Properly tempered modern couverture does the same job unaided.
- The centresThe instruction to let the moulded fondant cones dry overnight, or better for a full day, is correct and worth keeping in mind generally: a skinned-over centre survives dipping, a soft one bleeds into the coating.
Chocolate dipping arrived in American home kitchens in the 1890s, after machine-made cocoa and cheap moulded "cakes" of unsweetened chocolate put the material within reach of ordinary households. Household manuals of the period treat the coating as a separate problem from the centre, because home cooks had no way to temper chocolate; the paraffin-and-lard shortcut was the standard workaround, and it persisted in community cookbooks and church fundraiser candy well into the 1970s. Additives like glycerin and linseed oil belong to a moment when the line between the pantry and the medicine chest, and between the kitchen and the paint shop, was much less firmly drawn than it is now.