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Chocolate Cream
Mrs. Spruance.
Soak one box Coxe's English gelatine (in cold water sufficient to cover) one hour; one quart of milk boiled; scrape two ounces of French chocolate, mix with eight spoons of white sugar moisten this with three spoons of the boiling milk ; then stir in the gelatine and the yolks of ten well-beaten eggs; stir three minutes briskly ; take off, strain, and add two teaspoons of vanilla ; strain and put in moulds to cool. Serve with sugar and cream.
This is a moulded chocolate custard set with gelatine — closer to a Bavarian cream than to modern chocolate mousse. The measurements assume a brand and a spoon size that no longer exist, so a few decisions have to be made before you start.
- The hinge: don't let the custard boilTen yolks stirred into a quart of boiling milk will curdle if the pan goes back to a hard simmer. Keep it below about 180F and stop as soon as it coats the spoon; the straining step in the original will catch any threads of cooked egg.
- "One box Coxe's English gelatine"Period boxes of shred or sheet gelatine were small, on the order of half an ounce to an ounce, and were generally reckoned to set about a quart of liquid; the exact weight is not certain. Modern powdered gelatine comes in ¼-oz envelopes; two envelopes give a soft spoonable cream, three a mould firm enough to turn out. Soak in cold water as written, then make sure it fully dissolves in the hot milk rather than merely dispersing.
- "Eight spoons" and "three spoons"The book does not say which spoon, and both readings are plausible. Tablespoons of sugar (½ cup) suits a quart of milk and 2 oz of unsweetened chocolate; teaspoons would leave it distinctly bitter. Treat the figure as a starting point and taste the milk before the yolks go in.
- "French chocolate"The term was used loosely in the period; it generally indicates a hard cake chocolate, unsweetened or only lightly sweetened, hard enough that scraping was easier than chopping. Use 2 oz of unsweetened or 100% chocolate, finely grated; if you substitute bittersweet, cut the sugar back.
- Straining twiceThe original strains once after cooking and again after the vanilla. No reason is given; the second pass may simply catch anything, egg or undissolved gelatine, that has not gone smoothly into the mixture.
- Moulding and unmouldingRinse the moulds in cold water before filling. Chill at least four to six hours; a quart-sized single mould wants overnight. Dip the mould briefly in warm water and invert onto a cold plate.
- Yield and servingA quart of milk plus ten yolks makes a generous eight to ten servings. "Serve with sugar and cream" most likely means cold cream and sugar offered at the table rather than whipped cream.
The Home Cook Book (Chicago, 1870s) was one of the earliest American community cookbooks, compiled from recipes signed by named contributors and sold for charity; the format spread across the country, and the dishes carry households' names, as Mrs. Spruance's does. Its heavy reliance on gelatine reflects the spread of packaged gelatine: J. & G. Cox of Edinburgh sold refined sheet gelatine as a commercial article, and Cox's Sparkling Gelatine was sold in American groceries, which meant a cook no longer had to boil calves' feet for a day to get a mould to stand up. Creams, charlottes and Bavarians are common in the cookbooks of the 1870s and 1880s — rich egg custards given architecture. Chocolate was still sold in hard cakes and more often drunk than eaten.