No. 99

Cooked Chocolate Icing

Glace Cuite au Chocolat

Put into a sugar-pan a quarter of a pound of unsweetened chocolate; let it soften at the oven door, and dilute it with two gills of warm syrup at sixteen degrees, or simply with water, then add to the liquid some icing sugar, so as to obtain a smooth preparation neither too soft nor too thin.

← No. 98 Grated Horseradish and Horseradish Ribbons Elementary Methods No. 100 Cooked Cocoa Icing →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a professional pastry department, so the quantities are given in gills and Baumé degrees and the consistency is left to the cook's judgment. The hinge is temperature: this glaze is spread while warm and fluid, and it stiffens fast as it cools.

GillsA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup of liquid. Against a quarter pound (4 oz) of chocolate that is a generous amount — add it gradually rather than all at once, since the finishing sugar cannot rescue a glaze that is already too thin.
Syrup at sixteen degreesThe reading is degrees Baume, taken with a syrup hydrometer of the kind used in nineteenth-century pastry work. Sixteen degrees is a light syrup; the recipe itself allows plain water instead, which is the simpler route.
Sugar-panAn unlined copper pan reserved for sugar work. Any heavy-bottomed saucepan does the same job here, since nothing is boiled.
Softening at the oven doorThis is gentle radiant warmth, not baking — the point is to bring the chocolate to the yielding stage without scorching it. A bowl set over barely steaming water is the modern equivalent; unsweetened chocolate scorches and turns grainy if it is allowed to get too hot.
Unsweetened chocolateUse 4 oz of unsweetened baking chocolate, not cocoa powder and not bittersweet. All the sweetness in this glaze comes from the syrup and the icing sugar, which is why the amount of sugar is left open.
Icing sugarConfectioners' or powdered sugar. Modern versions contain cornstarch, which thickens slightly more than the plain pulverized sugar of the period, so add it in small additions and sift it in to avoid lumps.
Judging the consistency"Neither too soft nor too thin" means it should coat the back of a spoon and flow back level in a few seconds. Test it on the side of a cold plate; if it sets dull and stiff, warm it a little, and if it runs off, add more sugar.
Yield and useThe finished quantity depends on how much icing sugar is worked in, so no fixed yield can be given; expect enough to glaze a cake or a tray of small pastries. Pour and spread it warm in one pass — reworking a cooling chocolate glaze leaves streaks.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its "Elementary Methods" chapter reads like a training manual for the kitchen's own staff: numbered building blocks, each assumed to be used inside larger preparations rather than made for its own sake. Glace here means a glaze or icing, not ice cream — the same word covers both in French kitchen usage, and Ranhofer keeps the French headings alongside his English ones throughout. The instruction to specify syrup "at sixteen degrees" is a mark of how the professional pastry trade worked at the time: sugar solutions were measured by hydrometer on the Baumé scale rather than by cup, so a syrup could be called for as precisely as a temperature. This icing sits immediately before a companion cocoa version, No. 100.