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Glace Au Chocolate
Place two ounces of grated chocolate in a saucepan with half teaspoon vanilla essence and keep at the oven door until melted; then add three ounces glazed sugar and the white of half an egg, place on the fire, mix with a small wooden spoon until just warm, remove, and immediately use as directed.
This is a poured chocolate icing in the French pastry idiom, and most of its vocabulary needs translating. One element, however, puts it out of reach: the egg white is warmed only to blood heat and then eaten as is.
- Why the cautionThe white of half an egg is heated "until just warm" and the mixture is used immediately, with no further cooking called for. Raw or barely warmed egg white can carry Salmonella, and nothing in the method brings it near the 160F usually given as the safe point. Use a current recipe for chocolate glaze, or one built on pasteurised egg white.
- Glazed sugarNot a glaze in the modern sense. In English translations of French confectionery of this period sucre glace is icing sugar, what an American shop sells as confectioners' or powdered sugar. Three ounces is roughly two-thirds to three-quarters of a cup, unsifted.
- Grated chocolateTwo ounces means block chocolate grated so it melts fast and evenly. Chocolate sold for cooking at this period was generally darker and less sweet than a modern eating bar, and the sugar in the recipe is doing much of the sweetening.
- "At the oven door"A range-era instruction for gentle indirect heat: the pan sat in the residual warmth escaping the closed oven, not on the fire. The modern equivalent of the intent is a bowl over barely steaming water, which is exactly why the mixture never gets hot.
- "Just warm" is deliberateThe temperature ceiling may not be carelessness: heat the whites much further and they begin to set into threads, and the glaze can go grainy rather than glossy. Whatever the reason, the egg is left effectively uncooked.
- Vanilla essenceHalf a teaspoon of essence at this date could mean anything from true vanilla extract to a synthetic vanillin solution of unpredictable strength. Modern extract is roughly comparable in dose.
- QuantityTwo ounces of chocolate with three of sugar yields only a small amount: enough for one small cake or a handful of petits fours. The recipe's own instruction to use it at once fits a glaze that stiffens as it cools.
Glace in French pastry means a glaze or icing, from the same root as glacer, to freeze or to gloss. This entry belongs to a family of egg-white icings long used in European and American cake decoration: sugar, flavouring, and just enough albumen to set the surface to a shine. The International Cook Book gathered such formulas from professional kitchens, and the phrasing here is spare, with its small wooden spoon and its instruction to use the glaze immediately "as directed." The oven door as a source of gentle heat is a detail that dates the page as firmly as any ingredient: it assumes a coal or wood range in constant use, radiating warmth all day whether anything was baking or not.