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Cocoa Coating
1/2 lb. cocoa 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons water Cream butter and cocoa and put in small sauce pan over water to melt. Add water. If too thick, add a little more water. Keep warm while dipping the fruit balls.
A working coating for hand-dipped fruit balls rather than a finished candy in its own right. Two things decide whether it succeeds: how gently it is melted, and what the word "cocoa" is taken to mean.
- What "cocoa" means hereHalf a pound of dry cocoa powder with only four tablespoons of liquid would be a stiff paste, not a dipping medium. The proportions only make sense if the cocoa is a sweetened cake or block chocolate of the kind sold for coating; the original is genuinely ambiguous on this point, so judge by consistency rather than by the weight.
- The hinge: water and chocolateAdding water to melted chocolate is exactly what modern candy makers avoid, because it makes the mass seize into a grainy lump. If you are working with real chocolate, thin it with a neutral fat instead; if you follow the recipe literally, add the water a few drops at a time and stir constantly.
- "Over water" means a double boilerSet a bowl or small pan over a larger pan of hot, not boiling, water. Keep the water below the bottom of the upper pan and do not let steam reach the chocolate.
- Temperature while dipping"Keep warm" means barely warm: fluid enough to coat, no hotter. The recipe gives no temperature. Overheating drives the fat out of a mixture like this and the finished shells dry dull and streaked.
- The centres must be cold and dryChill the fruit balls first and blot any surface moisture from dates or figs. A damp centre thins the coating and can make it slide off as it sets.
- SweetnessIf unsweetened cocoa is used, the coating will be harshly bitter against dried-fruit centres. Taste before dipping and sweeten with sifted confectioners' sugar rather than granulated, which will stay gritty.
- Setting and storageSet the dipped balls on parchment in a cool room, not the refrigerator; condensation on cold chocolate causes grey bloom. They keep a week or more in a tin at cool room temperature.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. Half a pound of coating will cover a few dozen small balls, depending on how thickly you dip.
Uncooked "fruit balls" -- dates, figs, raisins and nuts ground together, rolled, and dipped -- were a familiar form of American home candy making in the early twentieth century, and they turn up in the Christmas sections of household books because they need no thermometer, no boiling sugar and no special skill. A dipping coating like this one is the finishing step for a whole family of such sweets. Proper tempering, with its precise cooling and reheating, belonged to the professional confectioner's trade; domestic recipes of this kind simply told the reader to melt, thin and keep warm, and accepted a softer, duller shell as the price of convenience.