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Chocolate Cream (Take the whites of six eggs)
Take the whites of six eggs and beat them stiff, doing first one and then another, adding to them three soup-spoonfuls of powdered sugar and three sticks of chocolate that you have grated. If you have powdered chocolate by you, use that, and taste the mixture to judge when it is well flavored. Mix it all well in a cool place. To do this dish successfully, make it just before you wish to serve it.
This is a raw-egg-white foam, mixed and served without any cooking at any stage, which is why it cannot be recommended today. The notes below explain the original's terms and where it fails.
- Why it fails: the whites are never cookedNothing in the method brings the eggs to a temperature that would kill Salmonella; the whites are beaten cold and the dish goes straight to the table. Raw whites in an uncooked dessert are not supported by modern advice. If you want a chocolate egg-white cream, use a current recipe written for pasteurised whites or a cooked meringue base.
- The instruction that mattered most"Make it just before you wish to serve it" most likely refers to the fragility of the foam: an unstabilised white-only mixture with no cream, gelatine or cooked syrup will not hold for long. The recipe gives no reason, so this is inference rather than something it states.
- "Doing first one and then another"The phrase is ambiguous: it appears to mean the whites were worked in succession rather than all at once, a hand-whisking habit. The recipe specifies no bowl or equipment.
- Soup-spoonfulIn Belgian and French usage cuillerée à soupe is the tablespoon, about 15 ml. Three of powdered (i.e. superfine or icing) sugar is a very lean sweetening for six whites, which tells you the chocolate was expected to carry the dish.
- "Three sticks of chocolate"Chocolate was sold in small bars or cakes, and what exactly a "stick" weighed is genuinely ambiguous, which is why the recipe falls back on tasting. "Powdered chocolate" here probably means cocoa or a drinking-chocolate powder rather than a modern instant mix.
- Tasting the mixtureThe original tells the cook to taste to judge the flavouring when powdered chocolate is used. With raw whites that is a further point of exposure, on top of the uncooked mixture itself.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled during the First World War from recipes given by Belgian refugees who had fled to England after the invasion of 1914, and much of its charm and much of its vagueness come from that: these are dishes dictated from memory by displaced home cooks, without weights. This chocolate cream belongs to a large family of nineteenth-century European mousses and neiges built on nothing but beaten whites, sugar and a flavouring, cheap in everything except eggs and labour. That the flavouring is chocolate, and that the cook is assumed to have either bar chocolate or powdered chocolate to hand, is often taken to reflect Belgium's association with the chocolate trade — an assumption that is not something that could have been made of every kitchen in the book's English audience.