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Chocolate (Cup powdered sugar cup boiling)
cup powdered sugar 1 cup boiling water 1 teaspoon vanilla tine + cup cold water cup scalded milk whip from 3 cups cream Melt chocolate; add sugar and water; cook until smooth. Soak gelatine in cold water; dissolve in boiling water; add chocolate mixture. Chill partially; add vanilla, and whip from cream. Mold, chill, and serve, garnished with beaten cream and cherries. See colored illustration, Plate IV, opposite.
This is a chocolate Bavarian cream, and the text as printed has lost several of its quantities to the scanner: the amount of chocolate, the gelatine, and the fraction before "cup powdered sugar" are all missing, and the scalded milk never reappears in the method. Read it as a structure rather than a formula.
- The missing amountsA dessert of this type in a book of this date might use something like two ounces of unsweetened chocolate, a scant half-cup of sugar and about a tablespoon of granulated gelatine, but the page does not say so and the figures should not be treated as recovered. The scalded milk was presumably meant to go into the chocolate mixture before chilling.
- Powdered sugarIn American books of this period "powdered sugar" usually means a fine granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold under that name today. Ordinary caster or granulated sugar is the closer match, and it dissolves fully in the hot chocolate anyway.
- GelatineGranulated gelatine of this period is often said to have been coarser and less consistent than the modern product. One modern envelope is a quarter-ounce, about two and a quarter teaspoons, and sets roughly two cups of liquid to a spoonable cream. Soak in cold water until it swells, then dissolve in the boiling water off direct heat; prolonged boiling weakens the set.
- "Whip from 3 cups cream"The older method was to whip cream and skim the stiff froth off the top as it formed, returning the unwhipped liquid to be beaten again. Three cups of cream yields the froth, not three cups of whipped cream. Modern heavy cream whips wholesale, so about a cup and a half of cream beaten to soft peaks is the practical equivalent.
- The hinge: chill partiallyEverything depends on folding the cream into a chocolate base that has thickened to the consistency of raw egg white but has not set. Too warm and the cream deflates into a chocolate soup; too cold and the base seizes into lumps that will not disperse. Stir over ice and watch it rather than timing it.
- Molding and unmoldingRinse the mold with cold water before filling and it will release more cleanly. Chill at least four hours, then dip the mold to the rim in warm water for a few seconds and invert onto a cold plate.
- YieldSomething on the order of a quart mold, six to eight servings, though with the quantities missing this cannot be fixed from the page. The garnish of beaten cream and cherries is the period finish; maraschino or brandied cherries both suit it.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate and cocoa manufacturer, in 1907. Like Baker's promotional books of the same decade, it exists to put the firm's chocolate into as many dishes as possible. The dish itself is a Bavarian cream, generally traced to early nineteenth-century French pastry work and named for Bavaria without any very firm explanation of the connection; it is a custard or flavored base set with gelatine and lightened with whipped cream. The instruction to take the "whip from 3 cups cream" is the clearest period marker on the page: it belongs to an era of unhomogenized cream and hand beaters, when only the froth skimmed from the top was light enough to fold.