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Cream Chocolate
One cupful of cream, with enough white sugar to thicken it. Boil till thick, and when cold, roll up in little balls and put them on a dish on which has been poured some melted chocolate. Then pour over them with a spoon some melted chocolate. When quite cool, cut apart and trim off the edges, if uneven. This cream should be seasoned with a few drops of vanilla and the dish should be buttered.--Miss N.
A cream fondant centre dipped, or rather flooded, with melted chocolate. The recipe assumes a cook who knows candy by eye, so the two vague instructions — how much sugar, and how long to boil — are the ones worth pinning down.
- "Enough sugar to thicken it"For one cup of cream, work from roughly two to two and a half cups of granulated sugar. The proportion is not critical; the temperature you cook it to is.
- "Boil till thick" means soft ball"Boil till thick" most likely corresponds to what later cooks called the soft-ball stage -- roughly 236-240F on a thermometer. The recipe gives no stage or temperature, so this is an inference from the intended texture: cooked much lower the centres will not hold a ball, much higher and they set hard and grainy rather than creamy.
- Cool before working itThe recipe says only "when cold, roll up in little balls." Standard fondant practice is to let the syrup cool undisturbed to about 110F and then beat it until it turns opaque and stiff; agitating it while hot encourages large sugar crystals and a sandy texture. Vanilla is best added at the end of cooking or during the beating rather than into the boiling syrup.
- The buttered dishButter is there so the finished slab releases. A sheet of parchment does the same job more reliably and makes the later cutting easier.
- Why it is cut apartThis is not individual dipping. The balls are set in a pool of chocolate, more chocolate is spooned over, and the whole sheet sets as a slab that is then cut between the centres — which is why uneven edges need trimming.
- Melting the chocolateGood dark couverture, tempered, or a compound coating will give a firm, glossy shell. Chocolate that is simply melted and poured tends to set soft and dull and is prone to grey bloom as it sits.
- Cream keeps badlyThe high sugar content gives some protection, but a cream-based fondant is not indefinitely stable. Keep the finished sweets cool and covered and eat them within a week or so.
- YieldAbout 30 to 40 small centres, depending on how generously you roll them.
Cream candies of this kind belong to the later nineteenth-century vogue for home confectionery, when refined white sugar had become cheap enough to use by the cupful and eating chocolate -- as opposed to drinking chocolate -- was widely sold in blocks that a household cook could melt down. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia women, and the signature "Miss N." is typical of the book's method: recipes passed between households, written in the shorthand of people who already knew what a boiled cream looked like when it was ready.