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Chocolate Puffs
Mrs. O. L. Parker.
One pound sugar sifted, one of chocolate chopped very fine; mix together; beat the white of an egg, and stir in your chocolate and sugar; continue to beat until stiff paste; sugar your paper, drop them on it, and bake in a slow oven.
A meringue-style drop cookie from the era when chocolate meant a hard, bitter cake of ground cocoa liquor. The proportions as printed are the main obstacle.
- The egg is almost certainly underspecifiedOne pound of sugar plus one pound of chocolate against a single egg white will not come together as a paste of any kind. Either the number of whites was dropped or the sugar and chocolate quantities are wrong; add whites until you have a stiff, pipeable mass.
- What "chocolate" meantIn 1870s American kitchens this is unsweetened cake chocolate — Baker's or similar, roughly what we call unsweetened baking chocolate. It is not chips, not couverture, not cocoa powder. The pound of sugar is doing all the sweetening.
- Chopped, not meltedThe chocolate goes in as fine dry crumbs, which is what keeps the meringue stiff. Grate it or pulse it cold in a food processor; melted chocolate will collapse the whites.
- Sift the sugar for a reasonSuperfine or well-sifted granulated dissolves into the whites; coarse sugar weeps syrup during baking. Caster sugar is the closest modern equivalent.
- A slow oven300F, and 275F is better for a meringue of this kind. The goal is drying rather than browning; forty-five minutes to an hour, then leave them in the cooling oven to crisp.
- "Sugar your paper"They baked on paper dusted with sugar to stop sticking. Parchment does the job without the sugar, though a light dusting still gives the traditional glassy underside.
- YieldA full pound of sugar plus a pound of chocolate makes a great many puffs. Halving or quartering the recipe is sensible for a first attempt.
- StorageAirtight the moment they are cool. Meringues pull moisture from the air within hours and go leathery.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago in the mid-1870s from recipes contributed by local women, with proceeds going to charity — one of the earliest and most widely imitated American community cookbooks, and the reason so many of its entries carry a contributor's name like Mrs. O. L. Parker. Recipes of this kind, thin on method and assuming the reader already knows what a stiff paste looks like, were written for cooks who would be taught the rest by a neighbour. The dish itself belongs to the long European family of sugar-and-egg-white "puffs" and kisses that became newly fashionable in America once chocolate was cheap and reliable: by the 1870s pressed cakes of unsweetened chocolate were an ordinary grocery item rather than a luxury, and household books begin filling up with chocolate creams, caramels and puffs that would have been impractical a generation earlier.