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Chocolate Cream Mixture
Beat the one cup heavy cream in above recipe; add powdered sugar, chocolate and flavoring. Arrange in the shape of a pyramid; garnish with candied cherries and angelica, cut in small pieces.
A fragment that depends on the recipe printed above it, so the quantities of sugar, chocolate and flavoring are left to the cook's judgment. What follows fills in the assumptions a 1907 reader would have made without thinking.
- The missing quantitiesOnly the cream is specified. For one cup of heavy cream, 2 to 3 tablespoons of sugar and about 1 ounce of melted, cooled unsweetened chocolate is a proportion consistent with other cream desserts in books of this period, with half a teaspoon of vanilla. The original genuinely does not say, so treat any figure as a reconstruction rather than a conversion.
- Melted chocolate into cold creamThis is the hinge. Chocolate poured warm into whipped cream seizes into hard specks the moment it hits the cold fat. Let the melted chocolate cool to barely warm, then fold it in by hand at the very end; alternatively, sift unsweetened cocoa with the sugar before whipping and avoid the problem altogether.
- "Powdered sugar"In books of this period the term may mean a sugar ground finer than granulated rather than what is now sold as confectioners' or 10X; the recipe does not define it. If you use modern confectioners' sugar, the cornstarch in it is a small advantage here, as it helps stabilize the cream.
- Chocolate as Lowney sold itThe house product was unsweetened cake chocolate, roughly equivalent to today's baking chocolate; the recipe does not specify the form or package size. If you substitute a bittersweet bar, cut the added sugar back by half.
- Heavy cream nowUltra-pasteurized cream, the default in most supermarkets, whips slowly and to a looser peak than the lightly pasteurized cream of 1907. Chill the bowl and beater, and buy plain pasteurized heavy cream if you can find it. Stop at firm peaks, not stiff, or the pyramid will look grainy.
- Building the pyramidThe mixture is soft, so it will not hold a tall shape for long. Pipe it in descending rings through a large star tip, or pack it into a small conical mold or a rinsed-out sieve lined with damp cheesecloth and chill for an hour before turning out.
- AngelicaThe candied stem of Angelica archangelica, bright green and faintly medicinal, was the standard partner to candied cherries for a red-and-green garnish. It is now a specialty item from baking suppliers; candied citron or thin strips of candied lime peel give a similar effect.
- YieldOne cup of cream whips to roughly two cups and serves four as a light dessert. Assemble no more than two or three hours ahead and keep it refrigerated.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, one of the large American chocolate manufacturers of the era, and belongs to the long tradition of cookbooks published by food companies to teach households what to do with the product. Its chocolate desserts run heavily to creams, whips and mousses, dishes that show off the flavor of the chocolate itself rather than burying it in flour. The pyramid with candied cherries and angelica is a thoroughly Victorian piece of table architecture: sweets were expected to be built rather than merely served, and angelica's green stems were the standard confectioner's answer to the problem of a garnish that was neither red nor brown. That the recipe survives as a two-line variation on the page above it says something about how such books were used, by cooks reading straight through a chapter rather than flipping to a single dish.