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Chocolate Caramel
Place one and a half pounds granulated sugar in a copper basin, add ten ounces good chocolate, a pint thick cream, two gills raspberry syrup, a teaspoon vanilla essence, set the basin on brisk fire and constantly stir until sugar reaches the third degree. Remove, drop on a lightly oiled marble, keeping it one-third-inch in thickness by means of iron rods placed around. Let thoroughly cool off, remove rods, cut caramel in half-inch squares and wrap in small pieces of wax paper.
A French-style boiled caramel written for a professional confectioner: no thermometer, no pan sizes, and a slab-and-bars setup most home kitchens do not own. The substitutions are straightforward once you know what the old terms mean.
- "The third degree" is the whole recipeThis is the old confectioner's scale of sugar boiling, judged by hand tests rather than a thermometer, and the numbering varied from book to book. For a caramel that is firm enough to cut into squares but still chews, cook to the firm-ball stage, 245-250F on a candy thermometer; below that the slab will not hold a cut edge, and much above it you get brittle toffee.
- Gills and other unitsTwo gills is one cup of raspberry syrup. A pint of thick cream is two cups; "thick" here means heavy cream, around 36 percent fat, not clotted or reduced cream.
- The copper basinUnlined copper was the confectioner's standard because it conducts heat evenly, and sugar syrup was considered safe in it for the short time it boils. Any heavy-bottomed saucepan works, but choose one holding at least three quarts: cream and sugar foam up hard as they approach firm ball.
- Chocolate"Good chocolate" in a book of this date is likely to have meant unsweetened or barely sweetened block chocolate. Ten ounces of modern unsweetened chocolate against a pound and a half of sugar gives a very dark, only just sweet caramel; a 70 percent bittersweet chocolate gives a milder balance.
- Constant stirringTake this literally. Milk solids and chocolate scorch on the bottom long before the syrup reaches temperature, and a scorched batch tastes of it throughout. Use a flat-ended wooden or silicone tool and keep it moving across the base, not around the sides.
- The marble and the rodsThe iron bars are a frame that confines the poured caramel to a slab of even thickness. A rimmed pan lined with lightly oiled parchment or a silicone mat does the same job.
- Cutting and coolingLet it set at room temperature until firm but not cold and hard, then cut with an oiled chef's knife or a bench scraper. Fully chilled caramel cracks rather than cuts.
- YieldWrapped individually in wax paper they keep several weeks in a tin; unwrapped they will flow together.
The "degrees" language here places the recipe squarely in the French professional tradition that dominated American hotel and restaurant kitchens around 1900, when confectioners judged sugar by dipping wet fingers into the syrup and testing the ball or thread it formed rather than by thermometer. Filippini's International Cook Book gathers dishes from that world, and the copper basin, marble slab and iron caramel bars are all standard fittings of a hotel pastry department rather than a home kitchen. The dish is a caramel in the older sense of the word: a cooked sugar and cream confection cut into squares, which is what "caramel" meant on American candy counters long before it came to mean a sauce or a flavor. The syrup also adds acid, which helps keep the boiled sugar from crystallizing.