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Cookies, Cakes, and Doughnuts: Chocolate
Chocolate Hearts. 3 ounces Runkel's Chocolate, 1 pound powdered sugar, Whites 3 eggs, 1 teaspoonful McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla.
Melt the chocolate by standing over hot water; add the sugar, and mix thoroughly; work to a stiff paste with the unbeaten whites of eggs, then add the vanilla. If the paste seems too soft, add more sugar. Break off in small pieces and roll a quarter of an inch thick, sprinkling the board and paste with granulated sugar instead of flour. Cut with a heartshaped cake cutter, and place on pans oiled just enough to prevent sticking. Bake in a moderate oven.
When done, they will feel firm to the touch, a solid crust having formed over the top. They should be very light, and will loosen easily from the pan after being allowed to stand a moment to cool.
A three-ingredient chocolate paste cookie, closer to a rolled meringue than to a butter cookie. Nothing here is difficult, but the dough behaves unlike modern doughs and the brand names need translating.
- Runkel's chocolateRunkel Brothers was a New York chocolate firm; the product meant here is plain unsweetened baking chocolate. Three ounces of any unsweetened bar works. Do not substitute semisweet or chips, as the pound of sugar already carries all the sweetness the paste can hold.
- McIlhenny's Mexican VanillaA proprietary vanilla extract no longer on the market. "Mexican" indicated the origin of the bean rather than anything you need to match; one teaspoon of ordinary pure vanilla extract will do.
- Sugar and quantityA pound of powdered sugar is roughly 3 3/4 to 4 cups unsifted. Because the whites of three eggs vary a good deal in volume, expect to add more sugar if the paste is soft, exactly as the recipe directs.
- Unbeaten whites are deliberateThe hinge of the recipe. Beating the whites turns this into a piped meringue that will not roll. Stir them in flat and work the mass to a stiff, claylike paste.
- Sugar instead of flour on the boardGranulated sugar is what the recipe calls for as the dusting medium, and the paste is sticky enough that a light, frequent dusting is needed while rolling.
- Oven temperature"Moderate" in books of this period corresponds to somewhere around 325-375F; because a sugar-and-white paste scorches easily, the lower end is safer, and the cookies will still form the crust described. Watch for the top to set firm while the inside stays soft.
- PansOiled just enough means barely greased, or better, parchment. Too much fat makes the bottoms spread and fry. The brief rest before lifting matters, as they release cleanly once the sugar sets.
- YieldAbout three dozen hearts at a quarter inch thick and roughly two inches across, depending on the cutter. Like other sugar-and-white pastes, they are best kept dry in a tin.
The two brand names date this page firmly to the era when American cookbooks were paid for, or at least influenced, by manufacturers: Runkel Brothers chocolate and a proprietary vanilla appear here where a modern book would simply say unsweetened chocolate and vanilla extract. The cookie itself belongs to a large family of sugar-and-egg-white pastes that ran through nineteenth-century confectionery, kin to the almond macaroon and the meringue kiss, and made without butter or leavening because none is needed when sugar and albumen do the binding. Heart-shaped cutters were commonly sold as part of tin cutter sets. That a household compendium like this one includes a small piece of candy-shop work is characteristic of the period, when the line between the confectioner's trade and the home kitchen was thinning as cheap powdered sugar and reliable ranges became common.