Icing, Chocolate
INGREDIENTS for icing for 1 large cake. lb. of pounded loaf sugar, 3 oz. of chocolate, a small teacupful of water. AVERAGE COST, 4d. Grate the chocolate and put it, with the sugar and water, in a lined saucepan over a DISH OF ICES.
Raspberry, strawberry, currant and other fresh-fruit-water ices are made in the same manner.
TIME. hour to freeze the mixture.
SEASONABLE, with fresh fruit, in June, July and August.
A boiled sugar-and-chocolate glaze of the Victorian type: sugar syrup cooked to the thread, chocolate melted into it, poured warm over the cake. The written method here breaks off early, so a few points fill in what the period expected.
- Sugar quantityThe weight of pounded loaf sugar has lost its fraction in this text and cannot be recovered with confidence. A proportion in the region of half a pound of sugar to 3 oz of chocolate would be consistent with icings of this size, but that is inference rather than evidence.
- Loaf sugar, poundedLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a hard cone and broken up for use; pounding it produced something between caster and granulated. Ordinary granulated or caster sugar is the direct substitute.
- The chocolateVictorian "chocolate" for cooking was a plain unsweetened or barely sweetened cake, hard enough to grate. Use unsweetened chocolate or a 100% cocoa mass block; a modern dark eating bar will make the icing sweeter and softer than intended.
- Lined saucepanThe instruction refers to a copper pan lined with tin; period receipts routinely specified lined pans so that food did not sit against bare copper. Any heavy stainless or enamelled pan answers the same purpose.
- A small teacupfulA Victorian small teacup is roughly 5 to 6 fl oz, not the 8 oz American cup. Too much water only means longer boiling, but it changes how quickly the syrup reaches the right stage.
- The hinge: syrup stageThe text breaks off before the method, so the stage is inferred rather than stated. Period practice was to boil the syrup until it threads from the spoon, roughly 106-113C. Under-boiled, the icing never sets and soaks into the crumb; boiled much further it turns grainy and sets before it can be spread.
- Applying itPour while still warm and fluid onto a completely cold cake, spreading quickly with a palette knife dipped in hot water. It stiffens fast once off the heat and will not be worked twice.
Chocolate icings entered English cookery books in the middle of the nineteenth century, and grating a hard block of chocolate was long-standing practice in the domestic kitchen. Mrs Beeton's household manuals costed every receipt to the penny, and the fourpence given here places this among the cheaper decorative finishes: sugar was the bulk of the expense, chocolate still enough of a luxury that three ounces was thought worth naming separately.