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Chocolate Bonbons
Put half a pound of French chocolate in a sugar-boiler, and stand on the stove till the chocolate is soft. Dissolve half an ounce of gum arabic in a tablespoonful and a half of hot water, mix it with the softened chocolate, stir until the chocolate is smooth, then mix in two ounces of fine icing sugar. When well mixed, drop the chocolate from the spout of the sugar-boiler cutting it off with a piece of wire into pieces the size of Brazilian nuts. When the bonbons are dry, pack them in paper in cardboard boxes.
A very short confectionery formula that assumes a professional pastry bench: a copper sugar-boiler with a spout, a length of wire, and a warm room to dry the pieces. The whole thing hinges on keeping the chocolate barely warm.
- Heat is the whole recipe"stand on the stove till the chocolate is soft" means gentle warmth, not direct high heat, which can scorch chocolate quickly. Melt it in a bowl over barely steaming water, off the heat, and keep it under about 115F; chocolate seizes and turns grainy if it gets hot or if water splashes in.
- French chocolateIn this period the term generally indicated a sweetened dark eating chocolate rather than unsweetened baking chocolate; a 55-60% couverture is a reasonable modern stand-in. Half a pound is 8 oz, about 225 g.
- Sugar-boilerA heavy untinned copper pan with a pouring lip, used for sugar work. Any bowl plus a piping bag with a plain tip will do the same job here.
- Gum arabicStill sold as food-grade acacia gum powder, in baking and cake-decorating supplies. Half an ounce is about 14 g; it acts as a binder and gives the finished bonbon a firmer, slightly chewy body rather than a snap.
- Icing sugarConfectioners' sugar. Modern versions contain 3-5% cornstarch, which will thicken the mass a little more than the pure pulverised sugar Oscar had. Two ounces is about 55 g, or a scant half cup.
- The water will thicken things fastA tablespoon and a half of gum solution stirred into melted chocolate makes a stiff, fudge-like paste, not a fluid. If it becomes too thick to drop from a spout, work it as a paste and roll the pieces by hand.
- Size and yield"the size of Brazilian nuts" means Brazil nuts, roughly an inch long. Depending on how large the pieces are dropped, expect roughly 30 bonbons from this quantity.
- Drying and keepingBecause the chocolate is never tempered, the surface dries dull and may bloom grey. Leave the pieces on parchment at cool room temperature overnight before boxing, and eat within a week or two.
Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's celebrated ma avtre d'h avtel, published The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf in 1896, and its confectionery chapter reflects the hotel pastry department rather than the home cook: sugar-boilers, wire cutters, and gum arabic bought by the ounce. Gum arabic, the dried sap of acacia trees, had been a confectioner's staple for centuries as a binder and glaze, and it is what allows this mixture to hold a soft dropped shape without the tempering and moulding that a modern chocolatier would use. The word bonbon is simply the French nursery doubling of bon, "good," and by the 1890s it covered any small hand-finished sweet of the kind an American hotel would send up with coffee or pack into the cardboard boxes mentioned in the last line.