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Chocolate Creams
Beat the whites of 2 eggs to a stiff froth. Gradually beat into this 2 cups of confectioners' sugar. If the eggs be large, it may take a little more sugar. Flavor with ½ teaspoon vanilla, and work well. Now roll into little balls, and drop on a slightly buttered platter. Let the balls stand for an hour or more. Shave five ounces of unsweetened chocolate and put into a small bowl, which place on the fire in a saucepan containing boiling water. When the chocolate is melted, take the saucepan to the table, and drop the creams into the chocolate one at a time, taking them out with a fork and dropping them gently on the buttered dish. It will take half an hour or more to harden the chocolate.
This is an uncooked fondant: raw egg white bound with confectioners' sugar, shaped, air-dried and dipped. Nothing in the method ever reaches a temperature that would make the egg safe, and the centers are eaten as they are.
- The egg white is never cookedThe whites are beaten raw, worked with sugar, and set aside at room temperature for an hour. The chocolate coating is melted over a water bath at well under 212F and cools on contact, so the interior stays raw from start to finish. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella, and sugar and vanilla do not inactivate it.
- An hour standing at room temperatureThe balls are deliberately left out to form a skin before dipping. Sugar concentration in a fondant this soft is not reliably high enough to be self-preserving, so a raw-egg center sits in the temperature range where bacteria multiply.
- No pasteurization step exists in the methodCooked fondants and Italian-meringue centers take the sugar syrup to the soft-ball stage and pour it boiling into the whites, which is what makes those versions more defensible. This recipe has no syrup and no heat at all. If you want chocolate creams, use a current recipe built on a cooked syrup or pasteurized whites.
- Intended for guests and childrenWho eats it -- Raw egg should not be served to young children, the elderly, pregnant women or anyone immune-compromised. That is worth weighing before treating this as a harmless period curiosity.
- What the original terms meanFor reading rather than making: "unsweetened chocolate" is baking chocolate, roughly 100 percent cacao with no sugar, and the bowl set in a saucepan of boiling water is an improvised double boiler. The recipe does not state a yield.
Hand-dipped chocolate creams were the signature of the late nineteenth-century American candy trade and, by extension, of the ambitious home kitchen. Once cheap confectioners' sugar and blocks of unsweetened baking chocolate were readily at hand in the grocery, a cook could imitate the shop-window bonbon without a copper kettle or a candy thermometer, and community cookbooks of the period seem to have carried these no-cook fondants alongside the older boiled varieties. The raw-white shortcut is what made the recipe attractive: it produces a pliable, snow-white center in minutes, where a cooked fondant demands a syrup taken to an exact stage and then hours of ripening. Household writers of the day had no framework for egg-borne infection, and the risk of uncooked whites in confectionery was not widely recognized until well into the twentieth century, which is why recipes like this one circulated freely for decades.