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Chocolate (Cup sugar egg yolks cup cold)
½ cup sugar 4 egg yolks 1 cup cold water 2 tablespoons granulated gelatine 2 cups cream 1/4 teaspoon salt Melt chocolate; add sugar, eggs, and milk; cook in double boiler until mixture thickens; soak gelatine in cold water; dissolve in egg mixture, strain, cool, and when beginning to harden, fold in whip from two cups of cream. See colored illustration, Plate III, opposite.
This is a chocolate Bavarian cream, and the printed ingredient list has lost at least two items — the chocolate and the milk are both called for in the method but never quantified. Read the method first and treat the list as incomplete.
- Missing quantitiesThe instructions call for chocolate and milk that appear nowhere in the list. In comparable Bavarian creams of the period the proportions run to about 2 ounces of unsweetened chocolate and 1 to 1½ cups of milk for this quantity of yolks and cream, but the original text does not say, and any figure here is a reconstruction rather than a reading.
- What "chocolate" meantIn a Lowney's book, unqualified chocolate is the company's unsweetened cake baking chocolate, not cocoa powder and not anything sweetened. Modern unsweetened baking chocolate is the direct equivalent; if you substitute cocoa the custard will be thinner and the sugar will need adjusting.
- Granulated gelatineThis is plain unflavored powdered gelatine. Two tablespoons is roughly two and a half of today's ¼-ounce envelopes, which will set this firmly enough to unmold and slice — a softer, spoonable result takes appreciably less.
- The cup of cold waterThe full cup is for softening the gelatine, and it also thins the finished cream. If you want a dense custard, soften the gelatine in a smaller amount and expect a shorter setting time; the original quantity produces a lighter, more jellied dessert.
- The hinge: fold at the right momentEverything depends on the phrase "when beginning to harden." Fold the whipped cream in while the chocolate base is still fluid and the cream sinks and separates into layers; wait until it is properly set and it breaks into lumps you cannot smooth out. The base should be cool and thickened to the consistency of unbeaten egg white.
- Cooking the custardOver the double boiler, take the yolk mixture to about 170-175F, until it coats a spoon. Straining afterward is not optional — it catches any yolk that has tightened and any undissolved gelatine.
- Cream"Cream" here is heavy or whipping cream, whipped to soft peaks only. Two cups yields a large volume of whip, so use a bowl bigger than seems necessary for the folding.
- Setting and yieldTurn into a wetted mold or individual cups and chill at least 4 hours, longer for a large mold. As written this fills roughly a 1½-quart mold and serves eight.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like most maker-sponsored cookbooks of the early 1900s it exists to demonstrate the range of one product — hence the colored plates and the heavy weighting toward the dessert chapter. The dish itself belongs to the family of Bavarian creams, a nineteenth-century French pastry-kitchen form (bavarois) built on a cooked egg custard, a gelatine set, and folded whipped cream; the name is generally traced to the French kitchens of the period rather than to Bavaria itself, and no convincing origin story has ever been documented. What makes the recipe feel of its moment is the granulated gelatine: powdered, standardized gelatine sold in packets had only recently displaced the laborious business of clarifying calf's foot stock, and it put molded creams within reach of a household cook working without a pastry brigade.