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Chocolate Dominoes
1/2 cup chopped walnut meats cup chopped figs ½ cup almond paste grated rind of orange 2 squares Lowney's Premium Chocolate, melted teaspoon salt orange juice sugar Mix the ingredients with enough orange juice to make the mixture of the consistency to spread. Knead on a sugared board.
Cut in shape of dominoes, coat with melted chocolate, and decorate with pieces of almonds.
An uncooked fruit-and-nut confection shaped and coated to look like a set of dominoes. The original's measurements have lost their leading numbers in the printing, so a little judgment is needed.
- The missing quantities"cup chopped walnut meats" and "cup chopped figs" almost certainly mean one cup each, and "teaspoon salt" a quarter teaspoon at most — a full teaspoon would wreck it. The sugar and orange juice are deliberately open, added to taste and to texture.
- Squares of chocolateLowney's Premium was unsweetened baking chocolate sold in one-ounce squares, so two squares is 2 oz. The chocolate for the outer coating is additional and unmeasured; allow 6 to 8 oz for dipping, and semisweet gives a better eating result than unsweetened.
- The hinge: juice by the teaspoonAdd orange juice a teaspoon at a time. The paste should just hold together and roll without cracking; once it is wet enough to be sticky no amount of kneading on a sugared board will bring it back.
- Sugared boardUse confectioners' sugar, not granulated, dusted lightly on the work surface and rolling pin. Granulated sugar leaves a gritty crust and drags the surface.
- Figs and almond pasteUse dried Mission or Calimyrna figs, stems removed, chopped fine; if they are hard, plump them briefly in warm water and pat dry. Almond paste, sold in tubes or cans, has a higher proportion of almond and less sugar than marzipan; marzipan will make the mixture cloying.
- ShapingRoll to about a third of an inch and cut into rectangles roughly 1 by 2 inches. A shallow scored line across the middle, made before dipping, gives the domino its divide.
- Coating that sets firmThe book says only "melted chocolate." If you want a coating that snaps rather than staying soft and blooming grey, dark couverture needs tempering — melted, then cooled and brought back to a working temperature of about 88-90F, held there while dipping. Compound coating chocolate needs no tempering if a matte finish is acceptable.
- The pipsSlivered or thinly sliced blanched almonds pressed on while the coating is still wet read as the domino spots. Small dots of white royal icing, piped after the chocolate has set, show up better.
- Yield and keepingTwo to three dozen pieces from the quantities above, depending on how thin they are rolled. Store in a single layer in a tin at cool room temperature; refrigeration sweats the coating.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, one of the large American chocolate makers of the early twentieth century, and like most manufacturer cookbooks it appears designed to put the brand's name into as many recipes as possible — hence "Lowney's Premium Chocolate" written into the ingredient list rather than simply "chocolate." The confection itself belongs to a genre of uncooked candies popular in the period, in which dried fruit, nuts and almond paste were bound with a little juice and worked on a sugared board, requiring no thermometer and no sugar boiling. Naming and decorating sweets to look like other objects is often said to have been a fashion of the era, and dominoes, with their flat rectangles and white pips against a dark ground, suited chocolate coating better than most games did.