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Mocha Walnuts
1 egg yolk, well beaten 1/2 cup Irish potatoes 1 teaspoon coffee extract Confectioner's sugar 1 cup English walnut meats Beat egg yolk to a cream, add potatoes, boiled, drained and forced through a sieve, as described in Potato Fondant, and coffee extract. Gradually stir in confectioner's sugar until mass can be made into soft balls. Flatten these balls, press on walnut meats, and spread to dry. If desired for packing, dip them into crystal cooked to (220 degrees F.). To insure good surface and keep cream from drying out, it may be well to dip candy again after letting it dry for a day.
An uncooked potato-and-egg fondant from the era when mashed potato was a standard candy-shop filler. The historical vocabulary is worth decoding, but the confection itself is built around a raw yolk that is never heated.
- Why this one failsThe egg yolk is beaten raw into the fondant and never brought to any temperature at all. A brief dip in 220F syrup coats the outside of a set ball; it does not carry heat through the centre, which stays a raw-egg cream. The candy is then held at room temperature for a day or more and packed for gifting, which is precisely the condition Salmonella favours.
- The pasteurised-egg questionSubstituting a pasteurised yolk would address the pathogen but not the recipe as written, and the moisture and sugar ratios here are given only by feel. Use a current confectionery recipe if you want mocha walnut creams.
- "Irish potatoes"Ordinary white-fleshed potatoes, as distinct from sweet potatoes; the qualifier was needed where "potato" on its own could mean the sweet kind, particularly in the South. Whether the half-cup is measured before or after boiling and sieving the recipe does not say.
- "Crystal"Shop shorthand for a plain sugar-and-water syrup boiled to the thread stage, here specified at 220F, used as a thin dipping glaze rather than a coating chocolate. It sets glossy and seals the surface, which is why the recipe suggests a second dip.
- Coffee extractA concentrated liquid coffee flavouring, not brewed coffee and not instant granules. It supplied the "mocha" with almost no added water, which mattered in a fondant whose consistency was already being judged by hand.
- Potato as a fondant baseRiced potato was used because its moisture and starch carry a great deal of confectioner's sugar into a smooth, pliable mass without cooking a syrup to the soft-ball stage. It also spoils faster than a boiled sugar fondant, which is the other half of the problem here.
- "English walnut meats"The common Persian walnut sold in shells today, named to distinguish it from the native American black walnut, which is stronger and oilier and was often the cheaper nut where it grew.
Potato creams belong to a recognisable moment in American home candy-making, broadly the turn of the century into the 1920s, when cookbooks and pamphlets carried fondants stretched with mashed potato, cornstarch or condensed milk rather than boiled sugar syrup. The appeal was that no thermometer and no long boil were needed: a competent cook could produce dozens of dipped creams in an evening for Christmas boxes. "Mocha" as a flavour name comes from the Yemeni port of Mokha, once the great shipping point for coffee, and by this period it had drifted to mean simply coffee-flavoured, often with the implication of coffee paired with chocolate. The instruction to dip a second time after a day's drying is a reminder that these sweets were expected to travel and to sit on a sideboard, a hope the potato base could not really support.