Chocolate Creams
INGREDIENTS.-1 lb. of sugar, 3 oz of best arrowroot, rather more than pint of water, chocolate.
AVERAGE COST, 8d.
Mix the arrowroot with the water and put it in a lined saucepan; add the sugar and boil 10 minutes, stirring quickly the while; then take it off the fire and stir till it begins to cool, when flavour with vanilla or any other essence. Roll the mixture in little balls, melt some chocolate, dip each ball in it and lay on a buttered slab to cool.
This is a Victorian sugar-and-starch fondant rather than a cream in the dairy sense: a stiff arrowroot paste, rolled and dipped. The proportions work, but two things in the text need pinning down before you start.
- The water quantity is ambiguousThe line reads "rather more than pint of water" with the fraction lost in printing. Half a pint (about 10 fl oz / 280 ml) is the most plausible reading for this quantity of arrowroot, but it is a guess: judge by consistency rather than by the clock.
- You are boiling to a paste, not a sauceWith 1 lb sugar to 3 oz arrowroot, ten minutes of hard boiling drives off enough water to leave a thick, plastic mass that stiffens as it cools. If it is still pourable off the heat, keep it over the flame a little longer.
- Stir constantly and use a heavy panArrowroot and sugar at this concentration scorch on the bottom in seconds, and scorched starch tastes of it throughout. "Lined saucepan" meant tinned copper; any heavy non-reactive pan does the same job.
- Cool before flavouringThe instruction to stir until it begins to cool before adding essence is the hinge of the recipe. Vanilla or almond essence is largely alcohol and volatile aromatics, and stirred into a boiling mass most of the flavour leaves as steam.
- Roll while warm, dip when coldThe paste shapes cleanly at blood heat and cracks once fully set. Roll all the balls first, leave them to firm for half an hour, then dip; a warm centre will bleed into the chocolate and dull it.
- The chocolateBlock chocolate of this period was generally plain and dark, and less sweet than modern eating chocolate, which suits a filling this sugary. If you want a firm, glossy shell that snaps, temper it: melt gently to about 45C and bring it back to about 31C, working it as it cools, before dipping. Chocolate simply melted and used hot will set soft and streaked.
- Buttered slabA marble or granite slab, or a chilled baking sheet, lined with parchment. Butter works but leaves a film on the base of each sweet.
- YieldRoughly 35 to 45 sweets the size of a large marble, depending on how heavily you dip.
Chocolate creams belong to the mid-Victorian moment when chocolate was becoming a coating as well as a drink. Cheaper sugar and industrially ground cocoa made small confectionery a plausible home project, and books of this period are full of "creams" that contain no cream at all, only sugar bulked and bound with starch. Arrowroot, milled from the rhizome of Maranta arundinacea and imported largely from St Vincent, was prized in Victorian kitchens as among the most delicate and digestible of the starches, which is why it appears here in place of the cornflour or fondant a later confectioner would reach for. The costing of eightpence marks this out as a domestic economy recipe: a household could turn out shop-window sweets with a saucepan and a slab.