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Chocolate Cream Drops (Pound fine icing sugar)
1/2 pound fine icing sugar. 1 teaspoonful powdered gum arabic. 2 tablespoons water. 1 teaspoonful extract vanilla. 1/2 pound common chocolate Cut up the cake of chocolate into a tin cup and set in a shallow pan of hot water to melt by heat alone without adding any water. Dissolve the gum arabic in the two tablespoons of boiling water in a small bowl, then stir in fine powdered sugar enough to make it stiff dough, adding the vanilla at the same time. Turn it on the table, roll into a cord, cut off in balls size of hazel nuts and dip these in the melted chocolate. Set on a pan or dish to harden. Makes 75 to 100.
An uncooked fondant centre bound with gum arabic rather than boiled syrup, then hand-dipped. It works, but two details decide whether the shells set glossy or streaked and soft.
- Melt the chocolate dryThe instruction to melt over hot water "by heat alone without adding any water" is the hinge. A drop of water or steam will seize the chocolate into a grainy paste that cannot be rescued for dipping. Keep the bowl wider than the pan and wipe the base before you begin.
- Icing sugarModern confectioners' sugar is what is meant, but it contains 3-5% cornstarch, which absorbs a little more liquid than the pure pulverized sugar of the period. Expect to need slightly less than half a pound to reach a stiff dough, and add it in stages.
- Gum arabicSold as powdered acacia gum, still available from baking and confectionery suppliers. It gives the centre body and keeps it from slumping. Dissolving it in boiling water takes patience -- stir and let it stand a few minutes rather than adding more water.
- "Common chocolate"In nineteenth-century American usage this means plain cake chocolate for cooking, generally unsweetened or only lightly sweetened; the recipe's wording ("the cake of chocolate" for half a pound) suggests it was bought as a cake of about that size. For dipping, a bittersweet chocolate of about 60-70% is the practical modern choice rather than a true equivalent, since the centre is very sweet.
- TemperingSimply melted chocolate will set dull and soft and will bloom grey within days. If the drops are to be kept or given away, temper the chocolate -- hold dark chocolate at about 88-90F for dipping -- or accept that they are best eaten within a day or two.
- Size and yieldHazelnut-sized centres are about 1/2 inch across, which is what the stated count of 75 to 100 pieces implies. Larger centres will cut the count sharply and take much more chocolate per piece.
- Dipping and settingA dipping fork or two-tine fork beats fingers, which warm the centre. Set the finished drops on parchment rather than a bare pan, and let them harden at cool room temperature -- the refrigerator causes condensation and sticky, spotted shells.
Gum-paste centres like this one belong to a distinct branch of nineteenth-century candy making: confections built from cold sugar and a binder rather than from boiled syrup, which put them within reach of a cook working without a thermometer or a copper pan. Gum arabic, the dried sap of acacia trees, reached Europe and America both from Sudan by way of Egyptian and Levantine ports and from Senegal and the West African coast, and was a standard confectioner's and druggist's stock item, used in lozenges, pastilles and gum drops as much as in cream centres. Solid chocolate for cooking had been sold in cakes in America since the eighteenth century, and by the later nineteenth century industrial grinding and pressing had made it cheap and widely available -- roughly what this recipe means by "common chocolate".