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For Chocolate Lovers
For chocolate lovers, the following rule, given by an old housekeeper, will prove most acceptable. Put into a double boiler six ounces of grated chocolate and add to it a cupful of hot water and one cupful of sugar. Boil the mixture until it is thick and smooth. Remove from the fire and when it is cold, fold in one quart of whipped cream, turn it into a mould and put on the cover. To prevent salt water from entering, paste a strip of buttered paper around the edges; pack it in cracked ice and salt so that it is completely buried and leave it for four hours.
This is a still-frozen chocolate mousse — what period cookbooks would call a bombe or a frozen cream — set in a mould buried in ice and salt rather than churned. It works in a modern freezer with a few adjustments.
- The hinge: cool the syrup completelyThe chocolate mixture must be genuinely cold, not merely off the heat, before the cream goes in. Warm syrup melts whipped cream on contact and you will get a grainy, dense block instead of a light frozen cream. Spread it in a shallow dish and refrigerate it.
- Six ounces of grated chocolateIn books of this period this normally means plain unsweetened cake chocolate, grated because it was sold in hard blocks. Use 6 oz unsweetened baking chocolate, chopped; the full cup of sugar is calculated against an unsweetened chocolate, and modern semisweet would likely make the result cloying.
- "Boil until thick and smooth"In a double boiler it will not truly boil. Cook and stir until the sugar is fully dissolved and the mixture is a glossy, pourable syrup roughly the thickness of chocolate sauce — five to eight minutes. Overcooking to a candy stage will make it seize when chilled.
- A quart of whipped creamThis is ambiguous: it may mean a quart of liquid heavy cream, whipped (which roughly doubles in volume), or a quart of cream already whipped, i.e. about a pint of liquid. The larger reading is the more usual one in books of this period, but either will set. Whip only to soft peaks; stiff cream will not fold into a dense chocolate base without breaking, and over-whipped cream turns buttery in the freezer.
- The buttered paperThe seal exists because the mould sits directly in salted meltwater. A modern metal mould or loaf pan wrapped tightly in plastic and then foil serves the same purpose, and no seal at all is needed if you simply freeze it in a covered container.
- Ice and salt, or the freezerTraditional packing is about three parts cracked ice to one part coarse rock salt, which drives the brine well below 32F. A home freezer at 0F does the job unattended; allow six hours or overnight rather than four, since the original's brine bath chills far faster than still air.
- Unmoulding and servingDip the mould briefly in warm water and invert onto a chilled plate. Because there is no churning, the texture is firm and mousse-like; let it stand ten minutes before serving. The quantity is generous — twelve to sixteen small servings.
Frozen creams like this one belong to the era before mechanical refrigeration, when a frozen dessert generally meant a mould or freezer packed with cracked ice and coarse salt to chill the ice enough to freeze the contents. Unchurned versions such as this had the practical advantage of needing no freezer crank and little attention: pack the mould, bury it, and come back in a few hours. The instruction to grate the chocolate reflects its arriving as dense unsweetened cakes, so a cook adding a full cup of sugar was performing the sweetening that manufacturers later took over. Attributions to "an old housekeeper" recur in books of this period and suggest a rule passed along by practice rather than one worked out in a cooking school, the other great authority of the day.