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Chocolate Cream (IO leaves of gelatine well)
IO leaves of gelatine, well melted and sifted. 1 pint cream, well beaten. 3 1/2 sticks of chocolate melted with a little milk. Mix all the ingredients together and put them in a mold which has been previously wet.
A bare-bones set cream of the kind written down for a cook who already knew the method. Two things need pinning down before you start: how much chocolate a "stick" is, and the fact that the gelatine must be barely warm when it meets the whipped cream.
- The hinge: temperatureDissolved gelatine poured hot into whipped cream will collapse the foam and set in strings. Let it cool to just above body temperature, then slacken it with a spoonful or two of the cream before folding the rest in quickly.
- Gelatine leavesModern sheet gelatine is standardised by bloom strength (platinum, gold, silver; roughly 2 g a sheet) in a way the leaf sold in 1915 was not, and older leaves are generally reckoned weaker. Ten sheets to a pint of cream would probably give a rubbery block; four to five is a safer starting point for a spoonable cream. Soak the sheets in cold water until floppy, squeeze, and dissolve in a little warm milk rather than over direct heat.
- "Well melted and sifted"Sifted here means strained — pass the dissolved gelatine through a fine sieve or muslin to catch undissolved bits, which would otherwise show up as hard flecks in the finished cream.
- Sticks of chocolateA genuinely ambiguous measure. Eating chocolate was sold in batons of no standard size, so 3 1/2 sticks cannot be converted with any confidence. As a working start, use about 5 oz (140 g) of good dark chocolate melted with a few tablespoons of milk, and taste the mixture before it sets.
- Pint of creamIf the pint is American, 2 cups; if the book's Belgian contributor meant a British pint, 20 fl oz. Either works. Use heavy or whipping cream and beat only to soft peaks — stiff cream will not fold smoothly into the chocolate.
- SweeteningNo sugar is listed, most likely because the chocolate the writer had in mind was already sweetened. With modern 70% chocolate the result is austere; a couple of tablespoons of sugar or a little vanilla dissolved into the warm milk is in keeping.
- The wetted moldRinsing the mold with cold water and leaving it damp is the release trick — no fat needed. Chill at least four hours, then dip the mold briefly in warm water and invert.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 pints of finished cream, serving six.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled by Mrs. Brian Luck in 1915 from recipes given her by Belgian refugees who had fled to England after the German invasion, with the proceeds going to relief work; that is why so many of its entries read like notes dictated from memory rather than tested formulas — quantities in "sticks," no oven times, no yields. A chocolate cream set with gelatine was a familiar European dinner-party sweet by the late nineteenth century, the cold cousin of the moulded blancmanges and Bavarian creams, and it is unsurprising to find it in a Belgian household book, Belgium's chocolate trade being already substantial. The recipe's confidence that the reader knows what to do with melted gelatine and beaten cream says a good deal about the cooks who supplied it.