Cocoa Froth
1½ tablespoons granulated gelatine ¼ cup cold water cup boiling water 1 cup Lowney's Cocoa 1 cup sugar grated rind and juice of 1 lemon 4 egg whites teaspoon salt Soak gelatine in cold water; add boiling water. Mix cocoa, sugar, lemon juice and rind; add gelatine mixture; strain into a cold bowl. When mixture thickens, beat until frothy; add well-beaten whites, and beat until mixture will stand alone. Drop spoonfuls on serving dish and garnish with vanilla custard. 2 cups milk 4 egg yolks
A gelatine-set cocoa foam of the sort that filled the dessert chapter of every early twentieth-century candy-company cookbook. As written it depends on raw egg white that is never heated at any stage, and the accompanying custard is built on raw yolks, so it should not be reproduced from this text.
- Why the cautionThe four whites are beaten and folded into a cold gelatine mixture that is never cooked. Uncooked egg white carries a Salmonella risk that this method does nothing to reduce. Use a current recipe for a chocolate mousse or gelatine froth instead.
- The custard is also raw as givenThe trailing ingredients belong to the vanilla custard sauce used as a garnish, and a stirred custard must be cooked to about 175F to thicken and to make the yolks safe. The instructions for it are not present here, so there is nothing to follow.
- Granulated gelatineLoose powdered gelatine, measured by the spoon rather than in envelopes. One and a half tablespoons is roughly two of today's envelopes.
- Lowney's CocoaA natural, non-alkalised cocoa powder from the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, the book's publisher and the reason cocoa appears in nearly every chapter. Any natural cocoa is the equivalent; Dutch-process is milder and darker and behaves differently with acid.
- Cocoa by volumeA full cup of cocoa powder to a cup of sugar is a very dark, quite bitter base by modern taste; a cup of modern powder is about 85 to 90 g.
- "Beat until mixture will stand alone"The hinge of the original technique: the gelatine has to be caught at the point where it is syrupy but not set, then whipped hard enough to hold a peak before the whites go in. Too early and it will not aerate, too late and it breaks into lumps that never smooth out.
- YieldNot stated; the mixture gives several spooned portions, dropped on a serving dish and garnished with the vanilla custard.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and belongs to a whole genre of promotional cookbooks in which every recipe finds room for the sponsor's product. Cocoa Froth sits in a line of gelatine "snows," "sponges" and "whips" that dominated American dessert chapters once commercial powdered gelatine became cheap in the 1890s: a flavoured jelly whipped with beaten egg white until greatly increased in bulk, producing something that looked extravagant from very little. The lemon rind and juice here add flavour and acidity. It is served with a thin vanilla custard rather than whipped cream.