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S. D. F
One box of Coxe's gelatine dissolved in a pint of cold water, three pints of milk; put over to boil, with one cup of French chocolate; when the milk is just scalded, pour in the gelatine; sweaten to taste; boil five minutes, then take from the fire, flavour with vanilla, pour into moulds. When cold, serve with powdered sugar and cream.
A chocolate blancmange of the moulded-gelatine sort that filled the dessert pages of American charity cookbooks in the 1870s. Two things need attention before you start: how much gelatine a "box" actually was, and the instruction to boil it.
- Do not boil the gelatineDo not boil the gelatine hard -- prolonged boiling can reduce gelatine's setting strength and leave the mould slack. Scald the milk, dissolve the softened gelatine into it off the heat or at a bare steam, and stir only until no grains remain.
- One box of Coxe'sThe box was a proprietary measure and period books do not agree on its weight; the quantity commonly reckoned to set a quart is about half an ounce, or two modern envelopes. Here the gelatine is asked to set some two quarts of liquid, so expect a soft, spoonable cream rather than a firm turn-out; use more gelatine if you want it to stand up on a plate.
- Soften, then dissolveThe pint of cold water is a soaking step, though in the original it goes into the milk with the gelatine and counts as part of the total liquid. Ten minutes is enough for granules to swell; sheet gelatine, if that is what you have, wants squeezing out before use.
- French chocolateIn American books of the period this generally meant sweetened cake chocolate, ground or grated for drinking, rather than cocoa powder. A cup grated is roughly 4-5 oz; substitute chopped dark chocolate, or unsweetened cocoa whisked smooth with a little of the hot milk, adjusting the sugar accordingly.
- Sweeten to tasteWith unsweetened chocolate or cocoa, start at 3/4 cup sugar for the full quantity and taste while the mixture is still warm; chilled gelatine reads noticeably less sweet than warm custard.
- Vanilla lastAdding it off the heat, as directed, is correct: some of the extract's aroma is lost to steam if it goes in while the pan is hot.
- Moulding and unmouldingRinse the moulds in cold water and do not oil them. Four to six hours in the refrigerator for individual moulds, overnight for a large one; dip the mould briefly in warm water to release.
- YieldAbout two quarts, eight to ten servings. The powdered sugar and cream at the end read as an accompaniment rather than a garnish.
Moulded gelatine desserts like this one belong to the moment when setting a cream stopped being laborious. Blancmange has a longer and more tangled history than its Victorian form suggests, with the jelly-set white dish thickened with calf's-foot jelly, isinglass or ground almonds coming later; all of those setting agents demanded either hours of boiling bones or expensive imported fish glue. By the 1870s packaged refined gelatine, sold by brands such as J. & G. Cox of Edinburgh and spelled "Coxe's" as often as not in American books, put a quart of jelly within reach of any cook with a saucepan. That is why the recipe names a proprietary brand rather than a quantity, a habit that makes older gelatine recipes hard to scale today. The chocolate version reflects the same industrial shift on the other side of the pantry: "French chocolate" was pre-ground and sweetened, ready to stir into hot milk. The page reads like a contributed household receipt, which accounts for the initials at the head of the page and for the loose, conversational directions.