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Chocolate Icing
دو Ask any confectioner for a piece of "Baker's eagle cocoa; " and if you can not procure that, ask any grocer for pure cocoa in block, or what is called "Baker's premium cocoa." Place what you need of it in a basin, and stand the basin in boiling water until the cocoa is dissolved, then add powdered sugar to taste, and beat it well in; add also the whites of two eggs (whisked up a little) to every pound of cocoa used (this gives a gloss); beat the sugar in well and the whites of eggs; now with a knife spread the cocoa (or rather the chocolate now that it has the sugar in it, for chocolate is simply cocoa sweetened) evenly on the cake; be as quick as possible with it, for as soon as it cools it gets hard. If you wish simple cocoa icing, use the cocoa and whites of egg only; but if you wish sweet or chocolate icing, add the sugar. To help you a little in the first attempt, add one tablespoonful of hot water to a pound of cocoa; this will keep it moist and liquid a little longer, but it will take a little longer to harden.
This is an uncooked egg-white icing, and that is the sticking point: the whites go into chocolate that has only been softened over hot water, then straight onto the cake. Nothing in the method brings them to a temperature that would make them safe, so the notes below explain the recipe rather than adapt it.
- Why it fails nowTwo raw egg whites per pound of chocolate are beaten in cold and never heated further. Melted chocolate over a water bath sits well under the roughly 160F needed to deal with Salmonella in egg white, and the finished icing is held at room temperature on a cake for hours or days. Use a current recipe for chocolate glaze or a cooked/meringue icing instead.
- "Cocoa in block" is not cocoa powderCocoa sold in block or cake form, as the recipe specifies, was solid unsweetened chocolate rather than the defatted powder a modern label calls cocoa; the nearest modern equivalent is unsweetened baking chocolate. Exactly which Walter Baker lines the "eagle" and "premium" names refer to cannot be settled from the text. Substituting today's cocoa powder would give a dry paste that is very difficult to spread.
- The period's definition of chocolateThe recipe's aside that "chocolate is simply cocoa sweetened" shows how this author used the two words: "cocoa" for the plain ground bean, "chocolate" for the sweetened product. Trade usage of the period was not consistent on this point, and both words have shifted since, which is why the instructions read oddly.
- A pound is a great dealA pound of unsweetened chocolate plus sugar to taste would ice several large cakes. The recipe fixes no quantity at all: it says to melt "what you need" and gives the egg whites as a ratio of two to every pound.
- The working problem the author is solvingThe tablespoon of hot water and the egg white are both there to keep the mass fluid and glossy long enough to spread with a knife. Chocolate at bare melting point sets fast on a cool cake surface, which is the real reason for the repeated instruction to be quick.
Walter Baker & Company of Dorchester, Massachusetts, traces its chocolate mills to 1765 and was for much of the nineteenth century the best-known chocolate name in the United States; its products were sold in solid blocks and cakes rather than as powder, and its trademarks were familiar enough that a cookbook could simply tell readers to ask a confectioner for them by name. That kind of brand-specific instruction is characteristic of American compilations like The Dixie Cook Book, which were assembled from contributed household receipts and assumed a reader shopping at a general grocer where chocolate came in one or two forms only. It is often said that chocolate reached the late-Victorian cake first as a decorative coating and a flavouring for frostings, and only later became a standard ingredient in the cake batter itself.