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Cream Chocolate Caramel
Prepare a cream caramel, adding to the cream preparation three ounces plain, melted sweet chocolate.
This is a variation line rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you already have the book's cream caramel in front of you. A few things need translating before it will work.
- Which caramel is meantThis is almost certainly the confectionery caramel — a boiled sugar, cream and butter candy cut into squares — rather than the custard dessert with a caramel-syrup top, though the base recipe is not reproduced here. Such bases usually combine sugar, glucose or corn syrup, cream and butter.
- "Plain sweet chocolate"In period usage this means solid sweetened eating chocolate. It is not unsweetened baking chocolate; if you substitute that, the batch will taste flat and slightly bitter.
- Three ouncesAbout 85 g, chopped and melted gently before it goes in. Unless the base batch is very small, expect a caramel tinted and flavoured with chocolate rather than a chocolate candy; the base recipe is not given here, so the proportion cannot be fixed exactly.
- When to add itThe recipe directs the melted chocolate into the cream preparation. If you are worried about cocoa solids settling and catching on the bottom of the pan, stir it in nearer the end of cooking or off the heat instead.
- Cook to a numberOld caramel recipes rely on cold-water tests. Use a thermometer: 245-250F gives a caramel firm enough to cut and wrap, 240F a softer, spoonable one. Chocolate and its cocoa butter slightly soften the set, so err toward the higher end.
- Pan and cuttingPour into a buttered or parchment-lined 8-inch square pan to a depth of about half an inch, let stand several hours until fully firm, then cut with an oiled knife. Wrap the squares in waxed paper — cream caramels weep and stick if left open.
- YieldAn 8-inch pan cut into one-inch squares gives about 64 pieces; the actual yield depends on the base recipe's batch size, which is not given here.
Chocolate caramels were a familiar item in American and European confectioners' shops in the second half of the nineteenth century. Cookbooks of the period often wrote confectionery this way: one full recipe for the base, then a run of one-line variations — vanilla, coffee, nut, chocolate — each assuming the reader would turn back a page. The International Cook Book (1906) is by Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York.