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Ready Chocolate Powder (Cup sugar cup flour teaspoon)
cup sugar 1/4 cup flour + teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon vanilla confectioners' sugar Beat whites; add cream of tartar and sugar, and continue beating. Cut and fold in salt, chocolate, flour. Flavor and drop by spoonfuls on to a buttered sheet; sprinkle with sugar and bake in a moderate oven. cup butter 1 cup sugar 1 egg
The page has come through the scanner badly damaged: the egg whites, the cream of tartar and the chocolate are all named in the method but their quantities have dropped out of the ingredient list, and the final line (butter, sugar, egg) belongs to the recipe that follows, not to this one. What remains is recognisable as a chocolate meringue drop, and the technique is worth reading even if the proportions have to be reconstructed.
- What is missingThe list as printed gives only sugar, flour, salt, vanilla and confectioners' sugar. Egg whites, cream of tartar and chocolate appear in the instructions with no amounts at all, so this cannot be followed as written without guessing. Compare a full meringue-cookie formula before committing ingredients.
- The hinge: fold, do not stir"Cut and fold" is the whole recipe. Once the whites hold a glossy peak, the dry ingredients and melted or powdered chocolate go in with a spatula in as few strokes as possible; beating them in deflates the foam and the drops spread flat instead of holding their shape.
- Cream of tartarIt stabilises the whites rather than flavouring them. The standard proportion is about 1/8 teaspoon per egg white, added once the whites are frothy but before the sugar goes in.
- "Ready Chocolate Powder"The title points to a proprietary prepared chocolate powder rather than modern unsweetened cocoa or a bar of baking chocolate. Its exact make-up, including whether it was already sweetened, is not stated on the page, so any substitution may shift both the sugar level and the fat content of the batter.
- A moderate ovenIn period usage roughly 350-375F. For a meringue-based drop of this kind the lower end is safer, and the point is to dry the cookies through while keeping them pale at the edges.
- TimingNo time is given. Small spoonfuls need roughly 12 to 18 minutes; they are done when the surface is firm and the base lifts cleanly from the buttered sheet. Parchment is easier than butter alone, since sugar-heavy meringue grips a bare pan.
- Buttered sheetA "sheet" here is a flat baking pan without sides. Any modern half-sheet works.
- YieldCannot be worked out from the page, since the number of whites is missing; on a reconstructed two to three whites it would be roughly two dozen small drops. Store in a tightly closed tin, as humid air softens them.
This comes from a manufacturer's cookbook: the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston sold chocolate and cocoa, and its cook book existed to put those products into American home kitchens under their trade names. That is why an ingredient here is called "Ready Chocolate Powder" rather than described generically, and it is a large part of why such pages are hard to cook from a century later, since the branded preparation no longer exists in that form. Chocolate meringue drops themselves belong to a broad family of egg-white confections found throughout nineteenth-century American baking; they are often said to have been valued for using up whites left over from custards and ice creams, which in a household that made both would tend to accumulate.