Take
you put in tin mould. Give it a shake, and the chocolate will become flat. When cold, it will easily turn out. -Chocolate Harlequin Pistachios (No. 261).
In making harlequin pistachios, you warm some of the sweet chocolate by pounding it in a hot mortar. After it has been prepared in this manner, take some of it and wrap it round a blanched pistachio nut; roll it in the hand to give it the form of an olive, and throw it into nonpareils of mixed colours, so that it may be variously coloured, à la harlequin. Proceed with the remaining pistachio nuts after the same fashion, dropping them into the nonpareils so that the comfits will adhere to the pistachios. Fold them in coloured or fancy papers, with mottoes. The ends are generally fringed.
Chocolate Drops with Nonpareils (No. 262).
Prepare some warm chocolate as in the preceding recipe. When the chocolate has been well pounded and is a smooth impalpable paste, make it into balls the size of a small marble by rolling in the hand. Place them on square sheets of paper about one inch apart; having filled the sheet, take it by the corners and lift it up and down, letting it touch the table each time: this will flatten them. Completely cover their surfaces with white nonpareils, gently shaking off the surplus ones. After the drops are cold, they can be very easily removed from the paper. The drops should be about the size of a sixpence. Chocolate in Moulds (No. 263).
It is usual now amongst confectioners to use the English unsweetened chocolate, as it saves much time and trouble, and is equally good. To form it into shapes you must have two kinds of moulds, made either of thick tin or copper tinned inside; the one sort is impressed with a device or figure, and CHOCOLATE.
IOI with a narrow edge; the other is flat or nearly so, and the same size as the previous mould, with a shallow device in the centre. You put a piece of prepared chocolate into the first mould, and then cover it with the flat one; upon pressing it down the chocolate receives the form of both devices. After it is cold it can be easily taken out. It should have a shining appearance.
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THE
Three linked confectioner's methods from the chocolate chapter, written when chocolate was still worked by hand in a heated mortar rather than tempered on a marble slab. The instructions survive intact, but the material behaves differently now.
- Tempering is the hinge"Warm some of the sweet chocolate by pounding it in a hot mortar" is a nineteenth-century way of bringing chocolate to working consistency. Modern couverture must be tempered properly — melted to about 45C/115F, cooled to roughly 31C/88F for dark, and held there — or the drops will bloom grey and stay soft instead of setting with the "shining appearance" the author asks for at the end.
- NonpareilsThe tiny hard sugar spheres sold today as nonpareils. In the confectionery trade they were built up by panning around a small seed or sugar core; the mixed-colour sort is what gives the harlequin effect.
- "English unsweetened chocolate"Not the same as modern baking chocolate. It appears to have meant plain, unsugared chocolate sold in block form, ready to be worked and melted. A good dark couverture of 55-70 per cent will behave more agreeably here than a hundred-per-cent baking block.
- Size of a sixpenceThe Victorian sixpence was about three-quarters of an inch, or 19 mm, across. That is the finished diameter after the flattening step.
- The flattening trickLifting the loaded sheet by its corners and dropping it against the table is the same motion used today to settle moulds and knock out air bubbles. Do it on parchment or acetate, not writing paper, and the cold drops will release more cleanly still.
- The mouldsThe two-part impressed tin or tinned copper moulds described here are antique trade equipment. Rigid polycarbonate bonbon moulds give the same crisp device and gloss; press-moulding between two halves works only with chocolate held firmly in temper.
- Papers and mottoesFolding the finished pistachios in fringed coloured papers with a printed motto is the Victorian cracker-bonbon convention, not a food step. Skip it, or use pleated foil sweet cases.
- YieldNo quantities are given at all, which is normal for a trade manual.
The chapter is generally attributed to Robert Wells, writing for working bakers and confectioners in what is usually taken to be the closing decades of the nineteenth century, and it catches the trade at a turning point: the author notes that it is "usual now" to buy ready-made English unsweetened chocolate rather than grind and sweeten cacao in the shop, because it "saves much time and trouble." Steam-driven mills and the mid-century arrival of moulded eating chocolate had turned a labour of the mortar into a matter of melting a bought block. The harlequin name comes from the patched, particoloured costume of the commedia dell'arte Harlequin, a stock reference in Victorian confectionery and pantomime alike for anything speckled with mixed colours. The fringed papers with mottoes place these sweets squarely in the world of the Christmas cracker and the dessert table favour, where the wrapper mattered nearly as much as the sweet inside.