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To Prepare the Chocolate
Pour some boiling water in a stone mortar to heat it well, remove, wipe dry, then place cacao in mortar and with stone-pounder, also warmed up, crush to a fine powder. Cut one-third of a bean best vanilla into exceedingly small pieces and add to cacao, sharply pound again for thirty minutes or till completely free from grit, detaching pulp with a spoon from around mortar once in a while. Gradually add a pound sifted fine sugar to the cacao, and vigorously pound again until a fine paste totally free from any clots. Take up pulp from mortar, roll it into a ball and sharply flatten between the hands. Repeat this three times. To have chocolate right the temperature where it is worked should be not less than 70 degrees.
Have two eight-sectioned chocolate moulds, each section to hold an ounce. Divide chocolate in two equal parts, then divide one part in half. Roll out these halves with the hands to length of mould and neatly and carefully spread it out equally to fully cover all sections of mould. Lift up mould by taking hold in centre of the narrow sides with thumb and finger and gently knock on table till chocolate is equally and smoothly spread in all the sections. Proceed with other half in same manner, then place both moulds on top of ice for thirty minutes, or until perfectly hard. Remove from ice, unmould, wrap in chocolate tinfoil, place in tin box, tightly cover, place in a dry, cool place and use when desired.
HOME-MADE CHOCOLATE WAFERS (PASTILLES) Have three ordinary low-edged tins (used for this purpose only). With the hands roll out remaining pound of chocolate to a long, thin, round, flute-like shape, then divide into small pieces the size of good-sized hazel nuts, roll with the fingers into balls and lay on tins a half inch apart. Take hold of a corner of each tin with the hand and slightly knock on table, so as to have the pastilles in a nice, round, smooth shape of about a half inch in diameter. As soon as a tin is full place it directly on the ice, and when another is ready place it alongside the first. When the third is finished the one first put on ice should be quite hard enough; remove and place the last one in its place and let stand until hard. Remove from ice, spread a large sheet of white paper on table, turn tins upside down and sharply shake off pastilles from pans. Dress on a dessert dish over a fancy paper and serve, or place in a tin box, tightly cover, place in a cool spot and use as required. N.B. Cacao shells should never be thrown away. Prepared as you would prepare tea, they make an excellent stomach-fortifying tonic. Place a tablespoon shells in a teapot, pour boiling water over, allow to infuse for ten minutes, strain and serve. Place shells in a covered tin, keep in a cool place and use as desired.
This is bean-to-bar chocolate made by hand, written for a household that could buy roasted cacao by the pound. The method works, but two things in it are quietly assumed: the beans arrive already roasted and winnowed, and the maker has the arm for half an hour of steady pounding.
- The starting ingredient"Cacao" here means roasted, hulled cacao nibs, not cocoa powder and not raw beans. The note about saving the shells confirms the cook was cracking and winnowing roasted beans; buy nibs and you skip that step entirely.
- Quantities are incompleteA pound of sugar and a third of a vanilla bean are specified, but the weight of cacao never is. From the finished output — sixteen one-ounce moulded bars plus a further pound of pastilles — the batch is roughly two pounds, which puts the nibs at about a pound. Treat that as a reconstruction, not the author's figure.
- The hinge: grinding to smoothness"Completely free from grit" is the whole recipe. The tongue detects particles above roughly 20-30 microns, and thirty minutes in a mortar will not get there — commercial makers run a stone melangeur for 12 to 48 hours. A food processor plus a stone wet grinder gets far closer than any amount of pounding.
- Warming the mortarNot fussiness. Cocoa butter melts around 34C/93F, and a cold stone mortar chills the mass into a stiff paste that will not grind. The same reason lies behind the instruction that the room be no cooler than 70F.
- No added cocoa butterModern bar recipes add extra cocoa butter, typically 10-20 percent, for fluidity and snap. This one relies entirely on the fat already in the nibs, which may be why the paste is worked and flattened by hand three times rather than poured.
- Ice is not temperingChilling hard on ice sets the chocolate quickly but crystallises the cocoa butter in unstable forms. Expect dull, streaky bars that are prone to grey bloom and melt readily in the hand. Proper tempering — working the chocolate down to about 27C and back up to 31C for dark — is what gives gloss and snap.
- Moulds and storageAn "eight-sectioned chocolate mould, each section to hold an ounce" is a rigid tinned-steel or later polycarbonate bar mould; a modern silicone bar mould is a direct substitute. Tinfoil in 1906 meant actual tin foil, not aluminium; any food-grade foil works. Store at 15-18C, away from anything aromatic, since cocoa butter picks up odours.
- YieldAbout sixteen one-ounce bars, plus a pound of half-inch pastilles.
- The shell teaCacao husk tea, still drunk in parts of Latin America and now sold as cacao tea. It is mildly stimulating from theobromine rather than "stomach-fortifying," and a ten-minute infusion is about right.
Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906) belongs to a moment when factory chocolate was already ubiquitous — Fry, Cadbury, Lindt and Hershey were all in business — yet a chef trained in the older European tradition still knew how to make it from the bean with nothing but a mortar. The technique described, warming the stone, adding sugar gradually, working the paste by folding and flattening, is essentially an older hand method transposed to a professional kitchen, and it long predates the conching machine Rodolphe Lindt is generally credited with introducing in the late 1870s. The pastilles are the older form of eating chocolate: small flat drops, sold by confectioners as pastilles or pistoles before moulded bars became the default. The instruction to keep the shells reflects a household economy in which nothing bought by the pound went in the bin — cacao shell tea appears in nineteenth-century domestic manuals as a cheap substitute for cocoa itself.